As far as I understand this discussion the 'requirement' is to enable look-up of G/PG/P keys from the Namecoin chain. As far as I can tell a Namecoin contains a link to the G/PG/P key. That does seem awfully close to what a HKP (the 'de-facto standard') server would do. So what Robert J. Jansen proposed seems like the best way to do that: provide an HKP gateway that would search for keys within the Namecoin chain, find elements that have G/PG/P key addresses, and proxy them to the end-user. This way nothing would have to be changed in Enigmail (or G/PG/P for that matter!).
Well... It might be an LDAP implementation rather than HKP... After such a server is built and ran (say hkp://hkp.nameid.org, or ldap://ldap.nameid.org) it would be trivial for users to add this address to their list of key servers, and maybe even petition to Enigmail to include that in the default key-server set. However that is a project on its own, and should probably be developed on its own. For what it's worth I believe, that the effort to build that into Enigmail would be nearly equal to building a stand-alone project. 2014-02-20 10:21 GMT+02:00 Daniel Kraft <[email protected]>: > Hi! > > On 2014-02-20 08:34, David Benfell wrote: >> On 2014-02-19 23:12, Robert J. Hansen wrote: >>> It's not necessary that it become official. After all, the HKP >>> keyserver protocol isn't documented in RFC4880. It's just necessary >>> that it become a de-facto standard way of querying for keys. If/when it >>> becomes a de-facto standard, GnuPG will quickly add support for it as a >>> keyserver protocol, and Enigmail will follow suit. >> >> I'm not a developer either. That said, when I look at namecoin, I see a >> mess that is a long ways from widespread support. The bitcoin protocol >> (upon which namecoin is based) apparently has problems, which I *don't >> think* impact namecoin, but suggest that bitcoin itself needs to mature >> a bit (which has implications for all of its derivatives). > > The "problems" in Bitcoin that recently surfaced have been known since a > long time and only affect certain, discouraged use-cases and Bitcoin > exchanges with bugs in their software and workflows. The principle > technical "problem" is also present in Namecoin, but it doesn't affect > the security of name storage or anything a user usually encounters at all. > > I do not claim that Namecoin has widespread support, but I believe that > it solves a problem that, from what I've heard, a lot of people outside > the Namecoin community believe is "unsolvable" (Zooko's triangle and > secure exchange of public keys). So my personal opinion is that it > would be great to have (fully optional!) experimental support for this > feature in Enigmail or a related tool where it could really make a > difference for key exchanges. > > But of course I understand that this is probably a controversial subject > and there are good arguments for not adding it to Enigmail (yet). > That's why I came here to discuss the idea first. If there's no other > way, I may actually indeed start with a fork to try things out and let > others test it and see how people like it, but as mentiond in another > email, I think this would be cumbersome since I would also have to > maintain the fork and keep up with upstream releases even when not > related to my own additions. This is what I've done with pidgin-otr > also, for instance. (But since they are currently discussing merging > OTR right into Pidgin proper, I've not maintained that and will wait for > the final result of these changes first.) > > Yours, > Daniel > > -- > http://www.domob.eu/ > OpenPGP: 901C 5216 0537 1D2A F071 5A0E 4D94 6EED 04F7 CF52 > Namecoin: id/domob -> https://nameid.org/?name=domob > -- > Done: Arc-Bar-Cav-Hea-Kni-Ran-Rog-Sam-Tou-Val-Wiz > To go: Mon-Pri > > _______________________________________________ > enigmail-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://admin.hostpoint.ch/mailman/listinfo/enigmail-users_enigmail.net _______________________________________________ enigmail-users mailing list [email protected] https://admin.hostpoint.ch/mailman/listinfo/enigmail-users_enigmail.net
