PGP/Keyserver/SKS

This Page was written with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in mind, and may not work correctly with other versions or distributions.

A Key Server is used to distribute PGP keys between different users. One of the most popular key servers for use with pgp/gpg is the sks key-server. This document will walk you through downloading, installing, and setting up a sks key-server on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Building the SKS Daemon

The following is for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

apt-get -y install gcc ocaml libdb6.0-dev gnupg wget

After installing the required software, you need to download SKS

gpg --keyserver hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net --trust-model always --recv-key 0x0B7F8B60E3EDFAE3
wget https://bitbucket.org/skskeyserver/sks-keyserver/downloads/sks-1.1.5.tgz
wget  https://bitbucket.org/skskeyserver/sks-keyserver/downloads/sks-1.1.5.tgz.asc
gpg --keyid-format long --verify sks-1.1.5.tgz.asc

The output of the last command should be

gpg: Signature made Mon 05 May 2014 02:06:51 PM CDT
gpg:                using RSA key 41259773973A612A
gpg: Good signature from "SKS Keyserver Signing Key"

Now, untar the software

tar -xzf sks-1.1.5.tgz
cd sks-1.1.5

Next copy the Makefile.local.unused to Makefile.local and change ldb-4.6 to ldb-6.0 for Ubuntu.

cp Makefile.local.unused Makefile.local
sed -i 's/ldb\-4.6/ldb\-6.0/' Makefile.local

Last, build the software

make dep
make all
make install

Configure the sks-server

/var/lib/sks/sksconf

# /var/lib/sks/sksconf

debuglevel: 3

# Set the hostname of your server
hostname:                       --keyserver-hostname--

hkp_address:                    127.0.0.1
hkp_port:                       11371
recon_port:                     11370

# Set the PGP ID for the Server Contact
server_contact:                 --contact-pgp-id--

initial_stat:
disable_mailsync:
membership_reload_interval:     1
stat_hour:                      12

max_matches:                    500

Download the needed database files

Rather than starting with an empty database and attempting to populate it by syncing with other keyservers (a bad idea because it loads up your peers with lots of traffic and will probably fail anyway with deadlocks in the conflict resolution system) we'll grab a static dump from an existing SKS server. Currently the only known source is:

• http://keyserver.mattrude.com/dump/ - Generated every DAY
• ftp://ftp.prato.linux.it/pub/keyring/ - Generated every Wednesday
• http://keyserver.borgnet.us/dump - Generated every Sunday

Download Keydump

The keydump is about 6.3GB as of Oct 2014, so fetching it will take a long time. It's divided into a bunch of individual numbered files so you'll need to fetch all of them. Because I'm too lazy to spend 8 hours sitting there doing it manually I did it like this:

mkdir /var/lib/sks/dump
cd /var/lib/sks/dump
wget -c -r -p -e robots=off --timestamping --level=1 --cut-dirs=3 \
--no-host-directories http://keyserver.mattrude.com/dump/current/

Many hours later, check that all the pieces downloaded correctly by comparing their checksums against the list published by the dump provider:

md5sum -c metadata-sks-dump.txt

Import the downloaded databases files

There are two ways to do this: either a full build (which reads in the dump you just downloaded and leaves you with a complete, self-contained database) or a fastbuild (which just references the dump and requires it to be left in place after the fastbuild is complete). I started doing a full build, it looked like it was going to take forever so I aborted it and switched to a quickbuild. On the 4-processor machine I was using it still took in the order of 40 minutes to run so this might take a while.

You need to be in the basedir when running this and the dumps have to be in a sub-directory called dump (which they should be if you followed the steps above), so:

cd /var/lib/sks

/usr/local/bin/sks_build.sh

On the next screen, choose 2.

Please select the mode in which you want to import the keydump:

1 - fastbuild
    only an index of the keydump is created and the keydump cannot be
    removed.

2 - normalbuild

    all the keydump will be imported in a new database. It takes longer
    time and more disk space, but the server will run faster (depending
    from the source/age of the keydump).
    The keydump can be removed after the import.

Enter enter the mode (1/2): 2

If you edit the sks_build.sh script you’ll discover it’s just a shell script which calls SKS itself to do the heavy lifting. If you have trouble with lack of memory you may need to tweak the script a bit: in particular the -n 10 flag used in the fastbuild call is a multiple of 15,000 keys to load at a time. The default setting therefore loads 150,000 keys at a time which could cause your machine to go into swap, and changing to something like -n 2 will cause it to load only 30,000 at a time instead and possibly complete the job faster. The trick is to load as many as possible in each pass without hitting swap - if that happens, performance falls through the floor and you may as well abort it and start again (after deleting the KDB and PTree directories created by the aborted import).

If all goes smoothly you'll end up with KDB and PTree directories in /var/lib/sks.

Configure your web-server

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf

#/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
 user www-data;
worker_processes 4;
pid /run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections 768;
}

http {
    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;
    client_max_body_size 8m;

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    error_log   /var/log/nginx/error.log;
    rewrite_log on;

    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;

    #----------------------------------------------------------------------
    # OpenPGP Public SKS Key Server
    #----------------------------------------------------------------------
    server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;
        listen --IPv4-Address-- default_server;
        listen [--IPv6-Address--]:11371 default_server;

        server_name *.sks-keyservers.net;
        server_name *.pool.sks-keyservers.net;
        server_name pgp.mit.edu;
        server_name keys.gnupg.net;

        root /var/www/html;

        rewrite ^/stats /pks/lookup?op=stats;
        rewrite ^/s/(.*) /pks/lookup?search=$1;
        rewrite ^/search/(.*) /pks/lookup?search=$1;
        rewrite ^/g/(.*) /pks/lookup?op=get&search=$1;
        rewrite ^/get/(.*) /pks/lookup?op=get&search=$1;
        rewrite ^/d/(.*) /pks/lookup?op=get&options=mr&search=$1;
        rewrite ^/download/(.*) /pks/lookup?op=get&options=mr&search=$1;

        location /pks {
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:11371;
            proxy_pass_header Server;
            add_header Via "1.1 --keyserver-hostname--:11371 (nginx)";
            proxy_ignore_client_abort on;
            client_max_body_size 8m;
        }
    }
}

Start the SKS Daemon

/etc/init.d/sks

#! /bin/sh DAEMON=/usr/local/bin/sks
DIR=/var/lib/sks

test -e $DAEMON || exit 0
test -d $DIR || exit 0

case "$1" in
        start) cd $DIR echo -n "Starting SKS:" echo -n \ sks_db
                $DAEMON db &
                echo -n \ sks_recon
                $DAEMON recon &
                echo "." ;;
        stop) echo -n "Stopping SKS:"
                killall sks
                while [ "`pidof sks`" ]; do sleep 1; done # wait until SKS processes have exited echo "." ;;
        restart) $0 stop
                sleep 1
                $0 start
        ;; *) echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}" exit 1
        ;; esac exit 0

Patches for the sks-keyserver software

SKS-Keyserver v1.1.5

• sks-1.1.5-download-txt.patch - Patch to change the downloadable “pgpkey.asc” file to a txt file, viewable in a web browser. (example) - download