Web of trust statistics and pathfinderThis is Wotsap, a tool to find paths and some other information about keys in the OpenPGP Web of Trust. Well, most people have no idea what that means, but I hope you at least believe me when I say that email easily can be, and is, intercepted, eavesdropped and sometimes even counterfeited. The solution to that is cryptography. Cryptography depends on good technical and mathematical solutions, and those parts are today pretty good. But it also needs social solutions. Wotsap has nothing to do with the technical and mathematical parts of cryptography, it just deals with the social problems, the relations between human beings. Which, by all means, needs some technology and mathematics to be dealt with efficiently. Human relations will, at least in the foreseeable future, be too hard for computer programs to deal with in any satisfactory manner, but they can, and this is the task of Wotsap, give some aid and help to ease the job for the human. The biggest design goal with Wotsap, and what differs it most from other related programs, is the separation of Web of Trust information extraction and analysis of that information. The first part takes place daily on the Swiss keyserver, and the second part takes place on this web server or on your computer. The glue between those parts is the .wot file format. A .wot file containing a snapshot of the Web of Trust information is currently much smaller than 1 MiB, growing slightly each day. Wotsap is constantly running on this server to answer questions from the search forms. Alternatively, you can download it and run it on your local computer. Wotsap is Free Software (sometimes called "Open Source software" and sometimes FLOSS, Free/Libre and Open Source Software) and is written in Python. | |
| Jörgen Cederlöf <jc+wotsap@lysator.liu.se> | |