Re: A couple of ideas for PGP-based programs

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 02:32 AM 1/6/96 -0800, Alan Olsen <alano@teleport.com> wrote:
>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
>the keys since that date. 

The web interface to the MIT keyserver lets you search for keys,
and probably some of the other interfaces do too.  So do a retrieve 
on REVOKE, snarf the output, and feed it to perl or grep or something.
<A href="http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-commands.html">PGP keyserver</A>

>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 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. 

I found that a very convenient way to add things to my keyring was to
use the keyserver web page and Private Idaho simultaneously.
Grab the keys you want on the keyserver, cut+paste into Private Idaho,
decrypt (PGP won't find a message, but will find keys), and click on
anything you don't recognize.  Parsing email isn't too tough,
but it takes some work, and it's easier for PC tools to interact through
Netscape or finger when they can instead.

> After n number of iterations you would have more of the
>"important keys" 

n=4 is an interesting depth, given PGP's default settings.....
#--
#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
#
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