Okay, I was told to not post to the list until I'd: 1. Lurked for a month, 2. Figured out who Detweiler was, 3. Found out about BlackNet and DC Nets, 4. Learned of at least three of David Chaum's innovations. And at that point "[I] may be ready to post [my] first comments." Well, dammit, I can't wait that long. I need help now. I've only been on for 2 weeks, I have no clue who Detweiler is (other than the welcome message I haven't heard two words about him/her/it), and I know enough to sound stupid about the other stuff. But if you still think I'm worthy of listeneing to, then read on. I work for Northrop Grumman Corp (SBMS division) when I have been tasked to create a program for reciept of online forms. The entire division is wanting to go paperless, and I am the sole person doing it. (Yes, I'm going for pity here.) I am writing my own CGI remailer for insecure forms, but some of them have to be secure. I think the best way to go about this is a public-key system with both keys stored locally and the public keys stored on a networked database (for routing purposes; ie, it has to go through managers and admin and will be verified and digitally signed with each hop). Now, of course, acces to the public keys will be through a key server. This is where I come into my problem. In my research into keyservers, I find that none of them are realtime. Sure, there are CGI interfaces to them, but that's not what I mean. I was hoping for something along the line of a Finger or SMTP protocol, such that a client connects to a host (say, keyserv.northgrum.com) on a certain port (say, 5397) and goes through a realtime version of what is accomplished via email. Something like: [connect] client>GET osborri server>200 OK server>-----Begin . . . and so forth. Now. Yes, I am intelligent enough to implement something like this. (Actually, that's debatable, but it's also besides the point.) What I want to know is this: Is there a realtime implementation out there already? Why? Because: 1. I do not want to reinvent the wheel. 2. I would like to conform to existing standards. Now, if the answer is a 'no', then who wants to draft a quickie RFC? -oz