From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 95 14:38:00 PST
To: A5113643667@attpls.net (Tom Jones)
Subject: Re: Does PGP scale well?
In-Reply-To: <9811968B>
Message-ID: <9502112237.AA17845@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Tom Jones says:
> Perry has repeated a litany here that I have been hearing for years on
> the pem-dev list with never a hint of a justification.  That is that
> PGP does not scale well.

I've given plenty of justification. You can't reverse map keys. Isn't
that bad enough?

> One of the reasons that I consider this to be untrue is my empirical
> experience with two groups that are constantly interested in exactly
> who I am: the government and the credit bureaus.  They both chose to
> use my SSN even though that has all the same attributes of a KeyID,
> except that it is somewhat denser.

Ahem.

Next you'll tell us that the hosts.txt database was a great idea and
you see no reason why we should have built the DNS. After all, host
addresses are only 32 bits, so the problem of mapping them into
hostnames should be easy to do in a flat database, right?

If you'd like to volunteer to run the centralized databases containing
the (at least) five billion keys for the population of the planet,
including handling tens to hundreds of billions of hits against them
per day, and probably tens of millions of updates per day (perhaps
you'd like us to enter them by hand, too?) and you'd like to supply
this service for free, then we will certainly be willing to talk.

Until you volunteer, however, leave the engineering to the people with
some experience in building large scale systems?


Perry

(Sure, TRW can store 100 million records in a giant database and index
them purely by a single unstructured number. 'taint cheap or fast,
however, and it certainly isn't amenable to decentralized maintainance
of the data.)