About pgp.net

pgp.net is an independent, non-commercial information site about PGP, OpenPGP and GnuPG. It explains how to find, publish and use public keys, and it keeps the historic ftp.pgp.net software archive online.

What happened to the pgp.net keyservers

In the 1990s and 2000s the pgp.net names pointed to a network of public keyservers (wwwkeys.pgp.net, subkeys.pgp.net and national servers such as wwwkeys.de.pgp.net), an email keyserver and FTP mirrors of PGP software. That network stopped working years ago. The keyserver history tells the story, and the keyserver pages explain what to use now.

What this site does

• Answers the old keyserver addresses: /pks/lookup links open the key lookup, which fetches the key from keys.openpgp.org in your browser. Programs such as gpg, curl and wget that request /pks/lookup over HTTP or HTTPS are redirected to the same query on keyserver.ubuntu.com. The old keyserver port 11371 is not served, so commands such as gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net still fail.
• Keeps the files of ftp://ftp.pgp.net/pub/pgp/ available over HTTPS at /pub/pgp/, unchanged and with their original dates. Old ftp.pgp.net web links are redirected to the same file.
• Publishes guides and a FAQ for today's tools, checked against the GnuPG manual, the OpenPGP standard (RFC 9580) and the projects' own documentation. Each page lists its sources.

What this site is not

pgp.net is not PGP Inc., Network Associates, PGP Corporation, Symantec or Broadcom, and not the GnuPG project or any keyserver operator. It does not run a keyserver, does not store keys and never asks for a private key or a passphrase. Trademarks belong to their owners.

Corrections

If something on a page is wrong or out of date, the source links at the bottom of each page show where the facts come from; the official documentation always wins.