[Cryptography] Size of the PGP userbase?

Phillip Hallam-Baker hallam at gmail.com
Wed Dec 11 16:35:41 EST 2013


Thanks for all the responses on and off the list.

The reason I wanted to ask is that I wanted to have a figure from a source
that the PGP community is not going to see as an attack. I am not doing
this as a competitive thing, I want to look at the ugly facts so that we
can change them.


Comodo has 155K active free S/MIME certs and the same number of paid certs.
Which is a lot more than I had expected.

Estimating like with like (current versus expired) I think we can safely
estimate a pool of people who have established keys for both specs at
roughly 3 million and a pool with currently active keys of between a half
million and a million.


My view is that both groups have hit a wall and that there is not going to
be a big uptick in deployment unless we do something to change the game.

They are big numbers that I read as indicating a big demand for email
security. But when we look at actual day to day use the results are far
more depressing. Schemes like dropbox and tumbleweed have far more use.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20131211/715fa1fc/attachment.html>


More information about the cryptography mailing list