The meat with multiple PGP subkeys

[David Shaw]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 03:47:01PM +0200, Stefan Kelm wrote:
> David,
> 
> > A reasonable question would be "Why don't all the PKS operators
> > replace their server with SKS or something else?".  I don't have a
> > good answer to that.  It's certainly been asked.[3]
> 
> ...and has been answered a number of times. The thing is (and most people 
> seem to forget about this now and then) that most, if not all, of the 
> pgp.net server operators do run their servers in their spare time. Since 
> pksd has a long history of not being overly stable one is happy once the 
> server is up and running. Thus, the never-change-a-running-system 
> paradigm is being lived in this realm.  

These servers are *broken*, and harming the use of PGP.  Countless
FAQs and other documents extol the keyserver network, and so new PGP
users try it and get their keys eaten.  One would hope that
never-change-a-running-system wouldn't apply when the running system
was actively causing damage.  It's not just subkeys: PKS allows for a
number of denial of service attacks against keys stored in it.

It's a question, but the way I see it, if a keyserver operator doesn't
want to fix critical bugs for fear of messing with a stable system,
then just turn the thing off.  That's stable too, and doesn't harm
anyone.

At least now there is subkeys.pgp.net so users can ignore the servers
that aren't being fixed (and we "just" have to educate everyone to use
it).

David

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