[Cryptography] Size of the PGP userbase?

ianG iang at iang.org
Sat Dec 14 01:56:12 EST 2013


On 13/12/13 21:27 PM, Jon Callas wrote:
>> I suspect you might be better off counting messages encrypted rather than users.  Anyone got an angle into a message tracking service?
>
> The stats on my server show that about 1.5% to 2% are encrypted/signed messages. Of that, about 85% are decryption/verify events. My results are obviously going to be more than the population at-large because I'm running an encryption server, but anecdotally, almost all of those are OpenPGP or S/MIME signature verifications.


Aha!  So you could measure the ratio of PGP to S/MIME usage by message 
from that.  You could also count the number of distinct users for each 
population.

As a proxy for PGP population, if you have the S/MIME population 
estimate from somewhere, multiple that with the ratio, and you have an 
estimate.  Standard marketing calculations...

iang



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