keyanalyze June 2001

Key Analysis begun 12 Jun 2001

The following stats are being pulled from a keyring that was provided by the.earth.li (thanks to Jonathan McDowell), which is complete as of June 11, 2001. This server's ring was the basis for my own initial import. Before reading this, please be sure to view the explanation of this analysis and read the FAQ before asking me any questions about it.

The strong set raw analysis is available here (~160KB). Please read the FAQ to explain how to read this file. This file includes all keys in the strong set.

General statistics

Size of binary keyring (bytes): 1,706,315,227

Number of keys: 1,461,786

Keys with at least one outside sig: 161,298

Number of those keys that have not been revoked: 151,751

Total outside sigs on those keys (not including self): 308,882

The "strong set"

Size of largest strongly connected set: 10,828

Keys that have signed this set: 15,133

Keys that this set has signed: 46,478

Best connected keys (shortest distance to)

Please read about the mean shortest distance (MSD) calculated here in the analysis explanation. Here are the top 50 keys. Look for your own key in this month's raw analysis (see above). Note that the only keys analyzed were those in the strong set. I've included some of my own comments on people I recognize. I'm sorry if you're listed here without a comment. If you email me a quick phrase to describe what you do that would be of interest to readers, I'll put it in.

The average MSD is 6.6741, in the set of 10,828. The median value is 6.4912.

Go to this keyserver's web interface to look up these keys.

Rank Hex ID (last 32b) Key Name (Identifier) Comments MSD

1 09590CFD Peter N. Wan GA Tech college of computing 4.1056

2 F1A37611 Theodore Y. Ts'o [ENCRYPTION] ext2fstools, Kerberos, much other 4.1580

3 466B4289 Theodore Ts'o [SIGNATURE] ext2fstools, Kerberos, much other 4.1709

4 4F570BA3 Ingmar Camphausen PGP security maverick 4.2124

5 8B4608A1 Peter N. Wan PNW2048 GA Tech college of computing 4.2554

6 C2009841 Niels Provos OpenBSD, OpenSSH, IPSEC 4.2614

7 0A2F87E5 Niels Provos (#2) OpenBSD, OpenSSH, IPSEC 4.2615

8 F081195D Matthias Bauer 4.2661

9 C7A966DD Philip R. Zimmermann Inventor of PGP 4.2851

10 0DBF906D Jeffrey I. Schiller MIT Security/Network Manager 4.2889

11 C1B06AF1 Derek Atkins PGP FAQ author, AFS Linux port, more 4.2905

12 7DFF8533 peter honeyman 4.3487

13 0679ED91 teun.nijssen@kub.nl Manages SURFnet servers, scanned PGP source code 4.3552

14 DA0EDC81 Phil Karn 4.3780

15 1CF27FD5 Marc Horowitz Author of pks PGP keyserver software 4.3915

16 08C95A15 SURFnet-Master-Certification-Key 4.4209

17 8531327F Martin Spill 4.4221

18 46F3212D LaMont Jones 4.4386

19 09D3E64D Greg Rose USENIX, PGPMoose 4.4460

20 7362BE39 Carl Ellison 4.4555

21 13D9873D Mirko Dziadzka 4.4561

22 2DE30EC1 CERT Coordination Center 4.4583

23 F95C2F6D Christoph Martin Debian maintainer & uni-mainz keyserver admin 4.4609

24 F82CEA91 Simon Cooper Author of "Building Internet Firewalls" 4.4623

25 66A74B31 Teun Nijssen Manages SURFnet servers, scanned PGP source code 4.4735

26 603F2D01 Stefan Kelm, DFN-PCA 4.4745

27 8B05342D Graham King 4.4752

28 4413B691 Thomas Lenggenhager 4.4837

29 AE8F7CF5 Martin Schulze joey of the Debian Project 4.4855

30 C3FC4C69 Steven M. Bellovin 4.4889

31 2AAA9781 Wolfgang Ley 4.5082

32 2B48F6F5 Ian Goldberg Cypherpunks, Zero Knowledge 4.5085

33 39F37F5D Lutz Donnerhacke 4.5142

34 01717265 Ilja Hallberg 4.5211

35 961F4A35 Tatu Ylonen 4.5254

36 DD934139 Patrick Feisthammel 4.5411

37 FC0C02D5 Eugene H. Spafford 4.5474

38 FAEBD5FC Philip R. Zimmermann Inventor of PGP 4.5480

39 52D1CAB1 Nathalie Weiler 4.5501

40 CAAED99D Axel Grossklaus 4.5532

41 F414952B Jeffrey I. Schiller 4.5651

42 955EC2C1 Phil Karn IETF IP Security Working Group 4.5657

43 1FE961A1 Harald Koenig xfree86 4.5667

44 E12469C1 Ruediger Weis 4.5674

45 5B0358A2 Werner Koch Author of GNU Privacy Guard 4.5710

46 4DBA1091 Gregory G. Rose USENIX, PGPMoose 4.5728

47 DC4ED62D Ingmar Camphausen, DFN-PCA (key expired) 4.5762

48 4D92D1B1 Rodney Thayer 4.5770

49 BB1D9F6D ct magazine CERTIFICATE 4.5792

50 6916C873 Peter N. Wan PNWGTDH4096 4.5801

In my own self plug, my own key sits at #1555 with an MSD of 5.4901. I'm just back from a key signing party though, so we'll see how it moves next month.

For next month

It seems easy enough to expand this analysis to keys that are reachable from the strong set as well, which would have been about 46,000 this month. The distance will simply be distance from the strong set, as the extra 35,000 keys will not be usable as a "from" address (as they cannot reach the strong set, else they would be in it).

I may also break out hop counts to each key, and also look for longest paths, etc, as that should be pretty easy.

If you have any suggestions, please send them my way, especially if you have the algorithms as well. I also haven't spent a great deal of time in optimization of my own code. If you're so inclined, please have a look and make this whole thing spend less CPU cycles (especially in the MSD calculations).