There was a note to Dave Farber's list that the Office of the Comptroller of Currency has approved Zion's First National Bank to certify digital signatures. Since they're in Utah, Zion's has a certain amount of legal infrastructure in place. The text version of the story is at http://www.occ.treas.gov/ftp/release/98-4.txt and the 20-page PDF with gory details is at http://www.occ.treas.gov/ftp/release/98-4att.pdf They're going to offer digital signature certificates with the usual binding of a key to a body plus papers, and provide software to support it. Some of their software can be used for encryption, and unfortunately they're going to offer key escrow, though as a separate business service, with keys encrypted by the key's corporate owner as well as by the bank for protection, but it's not going to be a mandatory service, and they have no intention of offering escrow for signature keys, only encryption keys. Their documentation does talk a good bit about crypto technology, in layman's terms, and about risk management and Y2000 compliance, and also in great detail about how things like this are standard banking functions applied in a digital environment (to convince the OCC to let them offer it, since they're a bank and aren't supposed to offer non-bank-related services). There's also a story in Network World at http://www.nwfusion.com/news/0202rsa.html about Verisign and Entrust CAs plans for IPOs. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639