On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, Mac Norton wrote:
INteresting, but seems to assume that Alice entered her key without seeing the relevant record, or that same was substituted after key entry. Plausible? yes. Practical? help. Easy? help, please.
Actualy there is a whole host of issues with key management in regards PKC and scaling to really usable system sizes. As Bruce points out, a major one is the identity authentication. And you can't use a levels of indirection (i.e. a key to certify a key add infinitum). Another is scaling, the problem with PGP is it's too hard to manage large (i.e. 100's of Millions of keys) at the individual level. Yet any usable systems must do just that. What organization resolves protocols and who decides whom the primary implimentor will be? Consider the code base validation issue? Compare closed and open source approaches, they each have some interesting problems. My personal opinion is the only workable system is a 3-party with the 3rd party acting as arbiter/notary. It is also just as clear that that group can't be either a government agency or a profit making business. I also believe that an OS along the Plan 9 lines is the ideal Internet framework. The Austin Cypherpunks ran an anonymous remailer for about a year and we discussed some of the issues we found on the cypherpunks list. You might look back at the archives from about 2-3 years ago. The machine was called kourier.ssz.com (it's long dead). There were also some legal liability issues that our meager legal skills simply didn't resolve, and we didn't have the money to do it professionaly. ____________________________________________________________________ He is able who thinks he is able. Buddha The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------