Pointers to useful information about PGP available on the web. This is not meant to be the complete guide to PGP itself. Regrettably, links on this page go out of date very rapidly. Please e-mail us when a link fails to respond or replacements or additions are in order.

About the PGP Keyserver

This key server is an experimental service. Please read the disclaimer. Please direct questions to the keymaster. Please look at the help file (somewhat out of date).

This keyserver is running PKS-0.9.2 by Marc Horowitz with some local modifications. It should be compatible with PGP 5.x keys and key formats of all types, and PGP 2.6.x keys and key formats of all types. The key server commands are similar to the old (Graff) key server. Please see below for more information and references.

A PGP certificate server is available from PGP, Inc. If there is any interest in this product please contact us. You may want to try using the email interface described below, or an alternate keyserver.

Are you [nearly] a First-Time User?

Read this section first and then go on to How to use the keyserver.

How to use the keyserver

There are 4 ways to access the ESnet keyserver database:
via the web, via email, via ftp, and via AFS.

WWW. Web access. Locate (called "Search") and Add (called "Submit") are the only interfaces provided. Instructions on the web page. See also the author's thesis. The FTP service can be found on the web at http://www.es.net/nic/pub/pgp. anonymous ftp access at ftp://ftp.es.net/pub/pgp. Only keydump and some indices provided.
Email. pgp-public-keys@es.net. Commands. AFS. We are considering offering some form of access to the database via AFS. Please let us know if you would find this useful. The FTP service described above is available at /afs/es.net/nic/pub/pgp
and on the web at http://www.es.net/nic/pub/pgp.

Other keyservers

If you want to access another keyserver, or if ours isn't working (please contact us!), try some of these links:

William H. Geiger III maintains a useful PGP Key Lookup page.

PGP.NET provides round-robin access to randomly-chosen servers at wwwkeys.pgp.net or www.pgp.net. Results can be quirky or disappointing -- don't complain to us, complain to postmaster@mail.pgp.net.

Our sync sites.

Some well-known sites:

PGP 2.6x PGP 5.x

Keyserver sources

The author is Marc Horowitz. His keyserver source distribution is available from MIT. We may make our local copy of the source available. We needed to make the following changes to kd_generic.c to load the MIT key database and merge our PGP 2.6x keyring: 


   keyinfo.bsize = 8192;
   keyinfo.cachesize = 65536;
   keyinfo.ffactor = 4;
[...]
   wordinfo.bsize = 2048 ;
   wordinfo.cachesize = 65536;
   wordinfo.ffactor = 4;

We have found dumping and rebuilding the database periodically helps avoid corruption problems. We have found that we must have pksdctl run thru the incoming queue every hour otherwise some pksd transactions are queued but not processed.

Synchronizing keyservers

This keyserver is synchronized with several others in the world. This is not a reliable service, in the sense that your key is not guaranteed to propagate to all other keyservers in the world, though in general this is what happens. It may be useful to check your key on other keyservers. Check our current sync sites.

We welcome other sync sites. Send us email with
ESnet Keyserver
  • Your keyserver email address
 pgp-public-keys@es.net
  • (at least 1) Administrative email address
 keymaster@es.net
  • (if possible) Person's name & email address
 Michael Helm helm@fionn.es.net
  • WWW URL
 http://www.es.net/hypertext/pgp/pgp.html

PGP FAQs and References

FAQ

Miscellaneous

Source

(Products, as well as freeware)

References

Cryptography

A few links that may be useful:
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