PGP Public Keyservers

Accessing the keyservers

To skip straight to the search function or the submit functions, click the appropriate links.

What is a public key?

If you are new to PGP and don't know what a public key is, please view my pgp tutorial before using the keyservers, then come back and submit your keys.

What are the keyservers?

The public keyservers are run by various people/institutions (you can search for them with Lycos or a similar search engine). They provide a free service which is very simply to store public keys for PGP users. This way, any user can search for someone's public key on the keyservers and download it. Remember: Do not automatically trust a public key because it was found on the keyservers! ... they do not authenticate the keys, just store them. Please see my document on authentication if you're not familliar with the issues involved in trusting a public key.

Note that all the keyservers are synchronised, so once you've used this form to submit your key to the keyservers, you do not need to submit it to any other, it will be sent to each automatically.

Submitting your public key

To submit your public key, please extract it and paste the ascii-armored key into the space provided below.

PGP -KXA [email protected] mbabcock.asc
This extracts my public key into a file named mbabcock.asc. I can then copy this to the clipboard in Windows by loading it into Notepad and hilighting it. Note: this submission is blatantly stolen from http://www.keyserver.net and does not work (at either location) sometimes. Don't blame me.

Extracting a public key

Links to other keyserver sites