Re: [Sks-devel] Bug#823394: sks: Exception raised when searching for specific key

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

[ adding the upstream sks-devel mailing list to this thread]

over on https://bugs.debian.org/823394, Joost wrote:

On Wed 2016-05-04 04:44:06 -0400, Joost van Baal-Ilić wrote:
> This query http://pgp.surfnet.nl/pks/lookup?search=satoshi&op=index gives
>
>  Error handling request
>  Error handling request. Exception raised.
>
> . It should of course either return "Search results for 'satoshi'" with a list
> of keys, or return "No results found  No results found: No keys found".  I
> suspect there _is_ a matching key; and I suspect sks in some way chokes on 
> that
> key.  Similar behaviour can be found at other sks keyservers (like e.g.
> pgp.mit.edu).
>
> FWIW, this bug looks a bit similar to https://bugs.debian.org/683328 .
>
> I can do _some_ debugging; but only on request and with some handholding.  I
> have no ocaml skills.

This is what's happening on the backend:

: 2016-05-06 16:38:58 Error handling request 
(GET,/pks/lookup?search=satoshi&op=index,[
: accept:*/*
: accept-encoding:identity
: connection:close
: host:localhost:11371
: user-agent:Wget/1.17.1 (linux-gnu)]): Invalid_argument("Too many responses")

it's not clear to me what the correct response should be for an sks
server in this case.  any ideas?  if a flood of matching User IDs make
it impossible to search for a user id, isn't that a DoS vector?

   --dkg

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