Does the PGP public key at https://www.washingtonpost.com/anonymous-news-tips/

[Andrew Gallagher]

> On 7 Aug 2022, at 17:28, Jay Sulzberger via Gnupg-users <gnupg-users at gnupg.org> wrote:
> 
> Andrew, do the sks keyservers work today?
> 
> I was able to find the key by going to
> 
> https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/
> 
> and putting
> 
> EC6C2905F0F93C0373946CA10642427A5FF780BE
> 
> into the search box.

Do you mean SKS the software (i.e. github.com/sks-keyserver) or SKS the protocol/network? The answer in both cases is “yes”, but for different values of “yes”. 🤓

What doesn’t work any more is the sks-keyservers.net pool, which had become a nightmare to manage. This has been taken by many to mean that the SKS network itself is down, but this is absolutely not the case.

sks-keyserver still works, but is IMO not suitable for use in production unless you are an expert willing to roll your own load balancing pool and recompile the code to update blacklists (there are still a few such brave souls left). This may change in the future — the software is maintained but hasn’t had a significant feature bump in some time.

The SKS network also still works, and depending on your choice of metric is probably more stable today than it has ever been. The reasons are twofold: many operators have migrated from sks-keyserver to hockeypuck, and most of the rest have shut down. This means that although there are fewer keyservers now than five years ago, the ones that do exist (including keyserver.ubuntu.com) are generally much more reliable.

Information about the SKS network can be found at https://spider.pgpkeys.eu

A