[Sks-devel] Potential problems running keyservers

[Hanno Böck]

Hi,

I'm currently having a closer look at the way pgp keyservers work
(details will be published at some point soon).

As it seems currently sks is the de-facto-default keyserver I thought
posting this here makes sense.

From my understanding the core principle of the pgp keyservers is that
they have an "add only"-policy, meaning you can never remove something,
just add further information to it (e.g. keys don't get removed, they
expire or are revoked).

This opens up a couple of problems and I wonder if they have been
discussed before and if there are any counterstrategies to them.

a) Someone could just flood the keyservers with random bogus keys. This
would basically fill up the hard drives of the keyservers.
b) Someone could grow a target's key by adding more and more
signatures. This would quickly make downloading the key from the
keyservers infeasible.
c) Someone could use keys, keyids, signatures or whatever to store
illegal data. (Basically this very same issue has already been
discussed in the context of bitcoin [1])

I don't really see any feasible counterstrategies to these issues.
Given the speed one can generate and upload material to key servers
(keys don't have to be valid to be accepted) I think all three scenarios
could easily happen.

I'm curious what the thoughts of the people running keyservers are.


[1]
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1akyy4/what_happens_if_someone_inserts_illegal_content/

cu,
-- 
Hanno Böck
http://hboeck.de/

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