From: Bryce Wilcox <wilcoxb@nag.cs.colorado.edu>
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 95 23:35:23 PDT
To: don@cs.byu.edu
Subject: Re: Announce: Web of Trust Ring
In-Reply-To: <199509071832.MAA00480@wero.byu.edu>
Message-ID: <199509080635.AAA01087@nag.cs.colorado.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



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> WEB OF TRUST KEYRING GENERATION PROJECT
> 
> I have completed my project to make a condensed version of the keyserver
> PGP keyrings, containing only the "web of trust" inter-related keys. My
> methods were rather crude, and unfortunately only extracted those people
> who have signed someone (already on the list) else's key. That means that
> people who are well connected on the web of trust are included, while
> those people who only receive signatures from well-connected people are
> not included.


A very interesting project!  Can you give us some data like how many is the
maximum number of hops necessary to connect two people on the WoT?  (I am
aware that one wouldn't want to trust such a connection, and that PGP doesn't
actually allow you to do so for hops > 2...)


(P.S.  I guess "12" based on the number of passes necessary.  That seems like
a really high number to me...)


Are any obvious pseudonyms in?  (I would guess not.)


I wonder what sorts of statistical analyses could be done on this WoT?  Is it
fairly evenly spread out or are the noticeably larger "clumps" of mutual
signatures?  How many keys *are* there in this (subset of the) WoT?


Here's a question:  for two randomly selected members of your WoT, how many
signatures would a Man In The Middle have to fake in order to isolate the one
member from the other?


Thanks for this, Don.


Bryce

signatures follow:


                                    +                                           
      public key on keyservers      /.      island Life in a chaos sea        
      or via finger 0x617c6db9      /           bryce.wilcox@colorado.edu     
                                    ---*                                     

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