[Cryptography] Size of the PGP userbase?

[Ralph Holz]

Hi,

> I am trying to get an estimate of the size of the PGP userbase for a
> presentation. Does anyone have figures?

I know of two publications over the past 10 years that analysed the Web
of Trust. Disclaimer: I am a co-author on one of them.

Capkun, S., Butty ́n, L., Hubaux, J.P.: Small Worlds in security systems:
an analysis of the PGP certificate graph. In: NSPW ’02: Proc. 2002
Workshop on New Security Paradigms, ACM (2002) 28–35

Ulrich, A., Holz, R., Hauck, P., Carle, G.: Investigating the OpenPGP
Web of Trust. ESORICS 2011.
http://www.net.in.tum.de/fileadmin/bibtex/publications/papers/Investigating_the_OpenPGP_Web_of_Trust_Ulrich_Holz_ESORICS_2011.pdf


There are also two Web sites, which may or may not be so accurate:

Web of Trust statistics and pathfinder.
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jc/wotsap/

Analysis of the strong set in the PGP web of trust.
http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/plot/

> I have some figures for S/MIME and I am trying to make sense of them.

How were these obtained? I thought about gathering some stats on these,
too, but did not like the idea of scanning Web sites for links to certs.
The alternative, using a traffic monitor and counting the S/MIME-typical
parts of mails, is no longer a good alternative as there is too much use
of Web mailers and SMTP connections are generally secured with SSL now.

Ralph

-- 
Ralph Holz
I8 - Network Architectures and Services
Technische Universität München
http://www.net.in.tum.de/de/mitarbeiter/holz/
Phone +49.89.289.18043
PGP: A805 D19C E23E 6BBB E0C4  86DC 520E 0C83 69B0 03EF