Subject: [openpgp] Web Key Directory (WKD) draft home on gitlab

From: Daniel Kahn Gillmor <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2019 15:56:24 -0500

Hi OpenPGP folks--

One of the key takeaways for me from the OpenPGP E-mail Summit that
happened in Berlin last month [0] was that Werner Koch's Web Key
Directory (WKD) [1] is clearly a desirable and useful standard for the
community of developers who work on OpenPGP-enabled e-mail clients.

 [0] https://wiki.gnupg.org/OpenPGPEmailSummit201910
 [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-koch-openpgp-webkey-service/

WKD was discussed in a dedicated session [1], but it was also threaded
throughout the discussions over the days of the summit.

 [2] https://wiki.gnupg.org/OpenPGPEmailSummit201910Notes#Workshop:_WKD

It was apparent from the lively conversation that WKD is considered part
of the critical infrastructure for OpenPGP e-mail clients these days,
and that there are subtle nuances to it that people actively wanted to
discuss.

After talking with Werner about it, i've set up a location where we can
keep track of outstanding issues with WKD on gitlab:

 [3] https://gitlab.com/openpgp-wg/webkey-directory

I hope that folks who have ideas, suggestions, or questions about WKD
will use the issue tracker there to help make sure their concerns are
addressed in future revisions of the draft.  I've opened three issues as
a start, covering themes I heard voiced at the summit:

 * Focus on WKD retrieval by splitting out the WKD Update Protocol to a
   separate draft
 * Size-based metadata leakage: padding concerns
 * Nuances about fallback from "advanced" to "direct" URLs

Hopefully others who have been using WKD will record their own concerns
on the issue tracker as well as bringing them up on the list here.

One helpful job would be for anyone who was at the WKD session at the
summit to go over the notes in [2] and transfer any relevant concerns to
issues in the gitlab issue tracker.

A note about the git repository hosted at gitlab:

While the WKD draft has been developed by Werner in his gnupg-doc repo
at https://dev.gnupg.org/source/gnupg-doc.git, that repository contains
lots of things that are not WKD-specific.

I used "git filter-branch" on the gnupg-doc repo to pull out just the
commits relating to the wkd draft, and what's on gitlab is the result of
that extraction.  I did this because i thought it would be simpler for
other people to engage with the draft if they don't have to worry about
the rest of gnupg-doc.  But if Werner doesn't want to switch to that
repository, I am fine with taking it down and pointing people to the
gnupg-doc repo instead.  Werner, please let me know if you want me to do
that.

Regards,

    --dkg