Open source PGP key server

Question

I am looking for an open-source PGP key server for Linux. It will be run as a private server, i.e. only accessible to a limited group of users.

My google searches have turned up lots of public key servers. But the only source code I could find is OpenPGP Public Key Server which is quite old.

Any better suggestions? I'm happy to use a bigger software package (somethign like Zimbra) if it has PGP key server support.

Answer 1

There is a bunch of open source OpenPGP key server implementations.

• The OpenPGP Public Key Server (PKS) based on a thesis of Mark Horrowitz is a rather old implementation, but still under active development.
• SKS keyserver is probably the one running most key servers at this time. There are ready-to-use packages for eg. Ubuntu.
• Hockeypuck is another very recent implementation of the SKS protocol in the Go language, that uses a PostgreSQL database as backend.

SKS and Hockeypuck use a more efficient set reconciliation protocol to synchronize with each other, PKS uses a less efficient approach. Both SKS and hockeypuck can be configured to also synchronize with PKS key servers using the old protocol.

Setting up PKS is a hassle. SKS is a little bit better, especially if readily packaged in your distribution. I recently set up a hockeypuck instance and really liked it. Clean software, well documented (although rather new) and a nice relational backend which you can easily have a look, no Berkley DB or similar hard-to-query stuff.

Answer 2

Another one is Mailvelope Key Server. Described as "A simple OpenPGP public key server that validates email address ownership of uploaded keys."

License: AGPL v3.0