A PGP Keyserver written in Bash shell script. "Netcat GnuPG Key Server", or commonly known as "Bash GKS"
The PGP Key server scene (admittedly, a small scene) is alarmingly homogenous with the dominant SKS running everywhere.
It's good to have other options too! In this case, we are different/advantageous on the following points:
- Low System Requirements - Runs on minimal hardware/OS setups (i.e. wireless SD cards, routers) without the need to install Ocaml and Berkeley DB (in the case of SKS).
- Dependencies: None, really. Perl and awk free! [GnuPG, netcat, bash, tr, grep, GNU Coreutils: mkfifo, rm, sed, echo, printf]
- Fast Adhoc Deployments - This is perfect for setting up something small for an offline group of people to share, manage, and easily exchange keys.
I pity the fool who runs this as a public facing service.
- Insecure - Runs gpg directly on raw input with minor sanitization.
- No database, no caching - Backed by GPG's flat file keystore, which certainly has not won any distinctions in industry.
- Netcat - To ensure wide compatibility, netcat is used such that it can only handle one connection at a time.
- Service Easily DOS'd - Following the previous point, the service can be easily locked up with requests even with connection timeouts.
- No replication - For all the reasons above, it doesn't have fancy reconciliation and replication of data to other instances of the keyserver.
bash ncGKS.shThe keyserver listens on port 11371 for incoming requests. Pull up http://localhost:11371/ to take a look.
Point your GnuPG client to this keyserver. In ~/.gnupg/config, simply add "keyserver hkp://this-server-address"
gpg --search-key <keywords>
gpg --send-key <951EE9FB>
gpg --recv-key <951EE9FB>
- Works with GNU bash, version 4.2.42(2)-release (i386-apple-darwin12.2.1), netcat version unknown, and gpg (GnuPG/MacGPG2) 2.0.19