[Cryptography] Size of the PGP userbase?

[Tamzen Cannoy]

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On Dec 11, 2013, at 1:35 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
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Don't forget all the private/invisible keyservers running what was PGP Universal and is now some Symantec thingie. That is a multiple hundreds of millions of $$$ a year that it pretty much invisible since it's inside various enterprises.


Tamzen




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