The keyserver network serves as a repository of OpenPGP keys, providing replication throughout the Internet. It currently uses an inefficient and insufficient protocol to keep its nodes synchronized: highly redundant network trafiic and excessive overhead due to several thousand e-mail messages per day. Under these conditions, even short network outages cause massive mail server overloads and losses, resulting in continuously diverging 'databases.In this paper; we present a new protocol to achieve complete synchronization efficiently and automatically, drastically reducing the need for manual intervention. Our protocol transmits only the updates and uses multicast to optimize the amount of data sent. Since support for native multicast is not widely available in the underlying network and current Internet multicast does not scale well, we base our keyserver on ALMI. ALMI is a middleware for reliable application-level multicast, providing scalable joidleave notification of neighbors, significantly reducing the complexity of the application. As a part of this work, we have also implemented a keyserver software which uses our protocol and an efficient RDBMS' [Ora] back-end to hold the keys.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.