[Cryptography] Size of the PGP userbase?

[Lars Luthman]

On Wed, 2013-12-11 at 08:51 -0500, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: 
> I am trying to get an estimate of the size of the PGP userbase for a
> presentation. Does anyone have figures?

It depends on what you mean by userbase, of course. There are plenty of
people who use it every time they install software upgrades if they use
Debian or some other operating system that signs and verifies packages
using GPG, but most of them are probably not even aware of that.

This page has some numbers on the strong set of PGP keys, i.e. the
largest set of keys where every pair is connected by a path of valid
signatures: http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/plot/ . Right now the strong set is a
bit over 50,000 keys. But this will include a lot of keys that are
abandoned or never used, and exclude everyone who either don't publish
their keys on the keyservers, don't publish the signatures they collect,
or simply don't bother with signatures at all but just verify keys
manually.


--ll
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