keyanalyze July 2001

Key Analysis 8 Jul 2001

The following stats are being pulled from a keyring that was exported from pgp.dtype.org on July 7, 2001. 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 (~547KB). Please read the FAQ to explain how to read this file. This file includes all keys reachable from the strong set. Look up reports for individual keys in the new raw output directory. Now you can see what keys are signed by each key (otherwise very difficult to find).

New This Month

Thanks to Thomas Roessler for pointing out the serious flaw in June's report that I didn't require a self-signature on keys in order to count them in the analysis. His corrected code fixed that, and sped up a part of the analysis by porting some preprocessing from perl to C. ***Note that this does reduce the size of the processed data somewhat, as it throws out some percentage of keys without self-signatures.

Hal J. Burch contributed a new BFS MeanCrawler() function, which sped up the mean shortest distance analysis by a huge amount. Processing is now in the hours order of magnitude rather than days for this part of the report.

Many thanks as well to Peter Wan for his tireless collection and aggregation of OpenPGP rings. I've also expanded the analysis to all keys reachable from the strong set, which is a significantly larger collection.

This month there is also a short individual report for each key in the analyzed set. Find your key in the raw output directory. Look for the first two digits of your hex ID for the directory, then your personal key ID.

General statistics

Size of binary keyring (bytes): 1,723,721,170

Number of keys: 1,472,698

Non-revoked keys with at least one outside (non-self) sig: 139,576

Total outside sigs on those keys (not including self): 286,291

The "strong set"

Size of largest strongly connected set (see size note above): 9,562

Keys that have signed this set: 13,967

Keys that this set has signed (target of MSD calculations): 38,235

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 reachable from 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 6.6411, in the set of 38,235. The median value is 6.2041.

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 4.0750

2 4F570BA3 Ingmar Camphausen PGP security maverick 4.0781

3 466B4289 Theodore Ts'o [SIGNATURE] ext2fstools, Kerberos, much other 4.1801

4 8B4608A1 Peter N. Wan PNW2048 GA Tech college of computing 4.2040

5 F081195D Matthias Bauer 4.2299

6 F95C2F6D Christoph Martin Debian maintainer & uni-mainz keyserver admin 4.2428

7 0A2F87E5 Niels Provos (#2) OpenBSD, OpenSSH, IPSEC 4.2522

8 C2009841 Niels Provos OpenBSD, OpenSSH, IPSEC 4.2575

9 09AC0A6A L. Sassaman 4.2661

10 0679ED91 teun.nijssen@kub.nl Manages SURFnet servers, scanned PGP source code 4.2838

11 C7A966DD Philip R. Zimmermann Inventor of PGP 4.2946

12 0DBF906D Jeffrey I. Schiller MIT Security/Network Manager 4.3196

13 1CF27FD5 Marc Horowitz Author of pks PGP keyserver software 4.3196

14 5B0358A2 Werner Koch Author of GNU Privacy Guard 4.3342

15 08C95A15 SURFnet-Master-Certification-Key 4.3453

16 8531327F Martin Spill 4.3471

17 66A74B31 Teun Nijssen Manages SURFnet servers, scanned PGP source code 4.3606

18 DD934139 Patrick Feisthammel hosts Swiss PGP keyserver, www.ch.pgp.net 4.3788

19 13D9873D Mirko Dziadzka 4.3882

20 52D1CAB1 Nathalie Weiler Security Researcher at ETH Zurich, Switzerland 4.3990

21 DC4ED62D Ingmar Camphausen, DFN-PCA (key expired) 4.4012

22 2B48F6F5 Ian Goldberg ISAAC, Crypto Guru 4.4213

23 DA0EDC81 Phil Karn 4.4259

24 FAEBD5FC Philip R. Zimmermann Inventor of PGP 4.4297

25 28C029AF Dave Del Torto 4.4302

26 603F2D01 Stefan Kelm, DFN-PCA former DFN-CERT and DFN-PCA 4.4405

27 E39AF3E9 Chelo Malagon 4.4410

28 BB1D9F6D ct magazine CERTIFICATE German computer magazine c't 4.4518

29 A094DA25 Patrick Feisthammel CERTIFICATION ONLY, Key A 4.4521

30 46F3212D LaMont Jones 4.4576

31 FE0B386D Pasztor, Miklos 4.4587

32 8B05342D Graham King 4.4732

33 00292B81 Nathalie Weiler Security Researcher at ETH Zurich, Switzerland 4.4744

34 09D3E64D Greg Rose USENIX, PGPMoose 4.4771

35 6916C873 Peter N. Wan PNWGTDH4096 4.4781

36 39F37F5D Lutz Donnerhacke privacy advocate & security expert 4.4786

37 7362BE39 Carl Ellison Chief Cryptographer, Intel 4.4830

38 2AAA9781 Wolfgang Ley former member of the DFN-CERT 4.4848

39 2DE30EC1 CERT Coordination Center 4.4862

40 ED9547ED Wichert Akkerman Debian Project Leader Emeritus 4.4900

41 75BE8097 Florian Lohoff 4.4907

42 C3FC4C69 Steven M. Bellovin Security Expert, AT&T Labs 4.4918

43 80B07A4F Theodore Ts'o ext2fstools, Kerberos, much other 4.4931

44 F086CBB5 Marcel Waldvogel 4.4961

45 4413B691 Thomas Lenggenhager 4.4968

46 CAAED99D Axel Grossklaus worked at DFN-CERT 4.5023

47 C158CCED Florian Lohoff 4.5026

48 E12469C1 Ruediger Weis 4.5073

49 34628F83 SURFnet-PCA-Medium-Security-Certification-Key 4.5149

50 F3A4BC95 Jeffrey V. Cook 4.5167

In the Drew self plug, my own key moved from #1555 to #272 with a new MSD of 4.8519. The jump was due to one Bay Area Debian keysigning and my adventures at USENIX in Boston. Off to Ottawa Linux Symposium in late July...

For next month

I didn't get to this for July, but for August, we may also break out hop counts to each key, and also look for longest paths, etc, as that should be pretty easy.

There are also some readability issues to solve, include setting things up so you can click on keys in the report to view them, etc. Also would like to see the text key IDs in some of the raw reports, to avoid having to look them up later.

Discussion about this analysis is now moved to the keyanalyze-discuss mailing list.

If you have any suggestions, please send them my way, especially if you have the algorithms as well. If you're so inclined, please have a look at the code as well.