From: “Perry E. Metzger” <perry@piermont.com>
To: Derek Atkins <warlord@mit.edu>
Message Hash: e4b684cbde4bdfd6dd0caa1ed01cb5d817ff2748cc171947f4c8f01935800219
Message ID: <199602292202.RAA19004@jekyll.piermont.com>
Reply To: <199602292139.QAA18366@toxicwaste.media.mit.edu>
UTC Datetime: 1996-03-08 01:58:49 UTC
Raw Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 09:58:49 +0800
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 09:58:49 +0800
To: Derek Atkins <warlord@mit.edu>
Subject: Re: A brief comparison of email encryption protocols
In-Reply-To: <199602292139.QAA18366@toxicwaste.media.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <199602292202.RAA19004@jekyll.piermont.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Derek Atkins writes:
> > is a URL just too big? My sigs are already several lines long. E.g.,
> >
> > Key: ftp://ftp.clark.net/pub/cme/cme.asc
>
> IMHO, yes. Consider for a minute: there are currently about 20000 PGP
> keys on the public keyservers. There are about 30000 signatures on
> those keys. The keyrings are already 8MB or more.
>
> Now, consider adding a URL to every signature. Lets even use your
> URL, which is 35 characters long (and lets not even count the NULL or
> length byte). Adding this URL to 30000 signatures would add 1050000
> bytes, or just over 1MB. This is an increase in 12% of the keyrings!
Yes, but we have to assume that the need for central key servers would
go away if we had a way of distributing the data around, which would
reduce the problem substantially...
> On the other hand, using my method and your "URL" (clark.net) would
> add only 10 bytes per sig, or 300k. This is only a 4% increase.
By the way, a lot of this discussion should probably also be taking
place on SPKI.
Perry
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