Re: Public Key Look Up

It appears that John C Klensin  <[email protected]> said:
>FWIW, also note that ideas of putting user or mailbox names (not
>just host names) into the DNS to support a variety of things has
>been around since the early design of the DNS.

I'd forgotten about RFC 7929 which purports to put PGP keys
in the DNS.  It's fairly badly broken since mail and the DNS
have different ideas about name matching, but it doesn't matter
because nobody ever has used it.

>I want to stress that I don't think this is a terrible idea,
>especially if it were used to retrieve keys for S/MIME or PGP
>use rather than inventing yet another mechanism.

I think it's a terrible idea both because it puts the keys in the wrong
place and the reasons you gave, extensions are optional which means
not implemented.

>At least for PGP, there are widely available public key stores
>from which an interested MUA could easily retrieve any keys that
>happen to be there using LDAP and probably other mechanisms --
>all less complicated than building something into SMTP. ...

Right.  This idea has failed plenty of times already.

R's,
John