PGP is widely used around the world. The development of PGP and its associated packages is carried out in many countries. Accordingly, it is vital that any UKERNA-sponsored initiatives are fully compatible with international developments. It is also important, in our view, that any local contributions to developments are made available to the global community. If we wish to have a system which we find satisfactory in our environment, we will need to argue our case and create tools which will be adopted by the rest of the community.
A number of ad hoc collaborations already exist at the personal level. As an example, the people running the first-generation email-based public key service are all members of a closed mailing list; they contribute to software development, co-operate in problem solving and so on.
Official interest in PGP services has been late starting but now seems to be picking up. The IETF has a secure-email working group and we believe that UKERNA should make a formal offer to assist with their work. The Dutch academic network, SURFnet, is setting up a PGP-based secure email infrastucture. They started almost a year before the UKERNA study and are beginning the implementation phase. A SURFnet representative, Teun Nijssen, came over to London to discuss secure email implementation in a large academic community. Among the topics discussed were the operation of certification authorities; key server provision in an international environment; user and institution support mechanisms; the populating of pgp.net (below); standards initiatives and co-ordination of national bodies such as UKERNA and SURFnet. That meeting was felt by the participants to be very useful to both communities. It is hoped to have a similar meeting with DFN (the German research network) shortly. There are no plans, as yet, to meet with analogous organizations in the rest of the world, particularly in the US, though we recognize that they most probably would be valuable.
The first concrete example of official international collaboration appeared in March 1996. At the meeting between SURFnet and UKERNA mentioned above, it was decided that a CD-ROM should be produced, containing a comprehensive collection of PGP-related material. The project was adopted by TERENA, and the CD was jointly produced by all three organizations. Four thousand copies were made in the first instance so that they could be distributed to academic institutions throughout Europe. The CD contains the latest versions of PGP for all common architectures (Amiga, Archimedes, Atari, Macintosh, MS-DOS, MS-Windows, Unix and Open-VMS); integration tools for mailers, editors and newsreaders; two keyservers (email and WWW); PGP's on-line help in fifteen languages; documentation in a number of languages; a complete keyring from the UK keyserver. In all there is over fifty megabytes of material on the CD.