[148413] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: [Cryptography] Size of the PGP userbase?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Phil Pennock)
Wed Dec 11 18:54:57 2013
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2013 16:38:41 -0500
From: Phil Pennock <md-cryptography@spodhuis.org>
To: Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam@gmail.com>
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"cryptography@metzdowd.com" <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
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On 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?
You're probably after Strong Set figures, which are the keys which are
usefully verifiable, although this ignores isolated islands, such as
companies with strong internal cross-signatures and no attempts to join
the Strong Set.
http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/plot/
About 53,000 keys are in the Strong Set.
* "The PGP web of trust can be viewed as a directed graph where the
points are the PGP keys, and the arrows (directed lines) are the
signatures."
* "The strong set is the largest set of keys such that for any two keys
in the set, there is a path from one to the other."
The active userbase will additionally include those who have no
cross-signatures, whether because the do understand the trust models and
just want a persistent identifier (but not a real-world-name-mapping
verifiable one) or, more commonly, because they don't understand.
-Phil
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