History
Key servers are made possible by the discovery of public key cryptography. In public key cryptography an individual is able to generate a key pair, where one of the keys is kept private while the other is distributed publicly. Knowledge of the public key does not compromise the security of public key cryptography. An individual holding the public key of a key pair can use that key to carry out cryptographic operations that allow secret communications with or strong authentication of the holder of the matching private key. The need to have the public key of a key pair in order to start communication or verify signatures is a bootstrapping problem. Locating keys on the web or writing to the individual asking them to transmit their public keys can be time consuming and insecure. Key servers act as central repositories to alleviate the need to individually transmit public keys and can act as the root of a chain of trust.
The first web-based PGP keyserver was written for a thesis by Marc Horowitz, while he was studying at MIT. Horowitz's keyserver was called the HKP Keyserver after a web-based OpenPGP HTTP Keyserver Protocol (HKP) it used to allow people to interact with the keyserver. Users were able to upload, download, and search keys either through HKP on port 11371, or through web pages which ran CGI scripts. Before the creation of the HKP Keyserver, keyservers relied on email processing scripts for interaction.
A separate key server, known as the PGP Certificate Server, was developed by PGP, Inc. and was used as the software (through version 2.5.x for the server) for the default key server in PGP through version 8.x (for the client software), keyserver.pgp.com. Network Associates was granted a patent co-authored by Jon Callas (United States Patent 6336186) on the key server concept.
To replace the aging Certificate Server, an LDAP-based key server was redesigned at Network Associates in part by Randy Harmon and Len Sassaman, called PGP Keyserver 7.0. With the release of PGP 6.0, LDAP was the preferred key server interface for Network Associates’ PGP versions. This LDAP and LDAPS key server (which also spoke HKP for backwards compatibility, though the protocol was (arguably correctly) referred to as “HTTP” or “HTTPS”) also formed the basis for the PGP Administration tools for private key servers in corporate settings, along with a schema for Netscape Directory Server. It was later replaced by the new PGP Corporation Global Directory.
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