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Goodbye, pgp.gwolf.org

I started running an SKS keyserver a couple of years ago (don’t really remember, but I think it was around 2014). I am, as you probably expect me to be given my lines of work, a believer of the Web-of-Trust model upon which the PGP network is built. I have published a couple of academic papers (Strengthening a Curated Web of Trust in a Geographically Distributed Project, with Gina Gallegos, Cryptologia 2016, and Insights on the large-scale deployment of a curated Web-of-Trust: the Debian project’s cryptographic keyring, with Victor González Quiroga, Journal of Internet Services and Applications, 2018) and presented several conferences regarding some aspects of it, mainly in relation to the Debian project.

Even in light of the recent flooding attacks (more info by dkg, Daniel Lange, Michael Altfield, others available; GnuPG task tracker). I still believe in the model. But I have had enough of the implementation’s brittleness. I don’t know how much to blame SKS and how much to blame myself, but I cannot devote more time to fiddling around to try to get it to work as it should — I was providing an unstable service. Besides, this year I had to rebuild the database three times already due to it getting corrupted… And yesterday I just could not get past of segfaults when importing.

So, I have taken the unhappy decision to shut down my service. I have contacted both the SKS mailing list and the servers I was peering with. Due to the narrow scope of a single SKS server, possibly this post is not needed… But it won’t hurt, so here it goes.

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