From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sun, 3 Mar 1996 09:27:16 +0800
To: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security" <PADGETT%TCCSLR@emamv1.orl.mmc.com>
Subject: Re: PGP 3.0/4.0
Message-ID: <199603030054.QAA28612@ix7.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 11:23 AM 3/1/96 -0500, you wrote:
>At the same time am trying to set up a secure mailing system for
>80,000 mailboxes (soon to be over 200,000) and the last time I put
>together a 6,000 key ring on a 386 it took three days & several Mb.

Fortunately, on a site this big, you can afford to use a Pentium or
Sparcstation and 32-bit code :-)  However, if it took you that long
(as opposed to, say 4 hours), you probably were short of RAM and
were paging a lot.

>This will require a "different" mechanism.

Yup.  You may be able to do it within the structure of the current PGP,
by dyamically managing keys in separate files (e.g. 80,000 files,
or condensations into keyrings of say 100 keys) though it would help
immensely to hack the key retrieval code.  Under PGP 3.0, you'll have
libraries to let you do this stuff; until then it's probably not
too hard to build a front-end (stealing the non-RSA portions of PGP)
that looks at the keys in a file and calls PGP with a request to use
the correct keyring file, or some such hackery.

Or, of course, you can license RSAREF and integrate the code yourself.
Depending on the email volume, it may be cheaper to just license RSA,
so you can use better bignum packages like some of the European PGP flavors.

#--
#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com / billstewart@attmail.com +1-415-442-2215
# http://www.idiom.com/~wcs     Pager +1-408-787-1281