
Ask HN: PGP Keyservers in Blockchain - olivierduval
Hello<p>I was wondering: do you know any keyserver using a blockchain technology? I found &quot;classic&quot; PGP Keyservers (like MIT) but I&#x27;m not really fond of any central entity (either Google, Facebook, MIT... or any other) managing my identity and it seemed to me that the blockchain could be a good technological candidate for that use-case (using BigChainDB for example: www.bigchaindb.com).<p>The blockchain could store mappings between email and public key. The addition to the blockchain should be guarded by a kind of challenge (like answering to an email crypted with the public key).<p>As a companion, an IMAP&#x2F;SMTP server (or mail application plugin) would be able to sign&#x2F;crypt&#x2F;decrypt&#x2F;check signature &quot;transparently&quot; (like any spamassassin for example, so it could be user-friendly) by checking either local db or asking to the keyserver...<p>Or the keyserver could implement the OpenPGP Server Protocol...<p>I&#x27;m surprised that I couldn&#x27;t find any information on that kind of idea (mixing Blockchain and Identity Management) so maybe there&#x27;s some strong drawback that I didn&#x27;t see... Or maybe I searched with the wrong keywords...?<p>Any help would be appreciated
Thanks in advance
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Leace
I don't know if you're still checking this thread but you can search for "Key
Transparency" and "CONIKS" that are two projects that store key data in
blockchain-like structures.

See also comparison: [https://blog.okturtles.org/2017/02/coniks-vs-key-
transparenc...](https://blog.okturtles.org/2017/02/coniks-vs-key-transparency-
vs-certificate-transparency-vs-blockchains/)

