The Web of Trust .wot file format, version 0.1 1. Overview To stimulate statistics and analyzes of the OpenPGP Web of Trust, a file format is proposed to carry information about key IDs, names and signatures, in files small enough to be easily downloaded by anyone. Because the OpenPGP Web of Trust is supposed to grow a lot, the file format is designed with compressed size as first priority. Key IDs and names are specified only once. The signatures are specified using sorted lists of indices into the key list. Similar data is close together. The result is a format which can store the current (Mars 2003) strongly connected set in less than 0.5 MiB. The first system to use this file format is Wotsap, http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jc/wotsap/. This file is available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jc/wotsap/wotfileformat.txt 2. File format A wot file is a bzip2-compressed ar-archive. All texts are coded using UTF-8, and all integers are in network byte order. The archive contains these files, in this order: "README": A short text describing what kind of file this is, and where and when it was generated. "WOTVERSION": The version of this specification, followed by a newline. Currently "0.1\n". "names" One string specifying the name (one of the user IDs) of each key. Each name is followed by a newline. "keys" Four bytes specifying the key ID of each key. The keys are in the same order as in the "names" file. "signatures" For each key, a list specifying the keys that has signed this key. The list elements are 4-byte indices into the above lists. The lists are in the same order as in the above files. The lists are separated by 0xFFFFFFFF. 4. Future extensions Future versions will, if possible, only add new files to the archive. Such versions will have version numbers 0.1.x. Current implementations must be able to read these files, by ignoring the extra files. If incompatible changes are introduced, the version number will change to 0.2. 5. Author and date Jörgen Cederlöf , 2003-03-26