-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: mianigand@outlook.net, cypherpunks@toad.com Date: Mon Nov 11 12:31:25 1996

...

My simple question is regarding key/certificate distribution:

Is there any particular reason that such can't be accomplished via on-line lists, and made available via a service on a port, using standard (textual) commands, like mail and such are now?

It's possible to have a key-server listen on a port and accept requests, then it would fork a process, process the result, and return an answer set.

But how many CPU cycles would it take for a machine to process a request, ie going through 1000 of keys? I am not exactly sure, it took a long while on my pentium.

In my opinion, if I were to run a key server as a service, with clients connecting and requesting a key it shouldn't take more than a minute to get a responce.

Agreed - a proper search algorithm should yield an answer in a few seconds, at most.

...

The things that come to mind are a 'client' request for a

key, a

...

'client' submission of a key, an external host requesting a key exchange, and the host itself requesting a key exchange with another system (only new/changed keys being swapped).

Had the exact same idea, but came up with an interesting concept. When a person submits a key, a PGP process is spawned yeilding the following information 1.) The name (peponmc@cris.com) 2.) The real name (Michael Peponis) 3.) The key size 4.) Creation date of the key 5.) Key finger print

This information, along with the acutal key would be inserted into a SQL Database table

With a structure similar to this

... <deletia> ... The reason I brought the idea up here was in the hope that others on the CP list could help work out the fussy details of the protocol: what info would need to be included for what types of exchanges, what port(s) would be good to work with, etc. Platform/implementation would be subject to considerable variation - but the idea would survive (hopefully :-)

It's not that hard, it's performance that's more of an issue. The beauty of my approch would be that initially, there would be alot of "Add" requests, resulting in many PGP processes running on the box, but eventually, they would tapper off.

Again, implementation on any particular platform using any particular OS would be up to the afficionados of said platforms/OS's. I'm more interested in the CP list coming up with the protocol/standards. Dave -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMoasIsVrTvyYOzAZAQEkTAP+JQtMdr5x+Wz4s6SXchgA4ow3+P9WLpzs JpjXRbNeHspJ2btlAe4pSgRqSp9oygqJ6Nxpa6DFOC4uB6sl3NaOw8tzcVVJm8GN +QsGP3KBoeTtRh1xE5yUsFoWmGWSqtDLLhu7bU34TaryLBU/Hvj2mOQXqwXhQlvE FhE5VETJJ2o= =LG7t -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----