A couple of ideas for PGP-based programs

[Jiri Baum]

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Hello cypherpunks at toad.com
  and Alan Olsen <alano at teleport.com>
 
...
> 1) Something I would like to see on the keyservers for PGP is a way of 
> retreving all of the key revokations since x date without having to get all of
...

Probably a good idea (that, and/or have a mailing list with key revocations).
How about it, keys.pgp.net people?

> 2)  I would like to see a program like private Idaho have the ability to send
> mail to the key server and grab all of the "unknown signator" keys.
...

This is very easy, at least in Unix: pgp -kvv, grep, cut, for.

In DOS, you can do pgp -kvv and find, then edlin to change
every "sig" into "call getkey", call the resulting (batch) file,
which will call GETKEY.BAT for every missing key. I hope.

However, I don't see much of a point to it: these are people you don't
even know the keys of; how are you going to know whether they are
trustworthy? (The Web-o-Trust can only tell you who they are, not
whether to trust them.)

...
> This would
> have the interesting effect of building a more complete keyring, while using 
> the "web of trust" to weed out alot of the bogus keys that tend to crop up on
> the key servers.  After n number of itenerations you would have more of the
> "important keys" and the ones that have little or no signage would be left to
...

No, you wouldn't. You would tend to have the keys that sign a lot
of other keys, which would include both SLED (Four-11) and a lot
of careless people that sign every key in sight.

How about, instead:

3) A way to retrieve all the keys signed by a given entity.

This would have the effect that when you come to trust Alice, you
can simply go and get all the keys she signed. I believe the present
keyservers don't allow that... (Or else I don't know how to ask for it.)


Hope that makes sense...

Adiau - Jiri
- --
If you want an answer, please mail to <jirib at cs.monash.edu.au>.
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