On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, Mac Norton wrote:
I think we knew that, but the particular problem posited here is that Alice's sig can be associated with a record she never saw, an acute symptom, not a chronic one, I'd hope. But I have asked for education in that regard, and hope it's forthcoming.
If 'you' knew that, nobody could tell from the comments. The general cypherpunks view seems to be the PGP web-of-trust is sufficient (and they are woefully wrong). This is actualy one of the two key problems with PKC management, authentication/verification. The other being scaling. The authentication/verification problem itself has two branches. The first being submitter/user authentication and the other being protocol/implimentation verification. As to scaling, I've been touting 'small network' approaches for years. It's interesting that Napster and it's ilk are just that. Couple this with a universal namespace (ala Plan 9) and some service like LDAP and you might have a usable system. Couple this with a cryptographicaly secure network layer (this is another key management problem also) and 'indepenent' or open source nameservers (for IP resolution, not to be confused with the 'working' namespace I mention above). The only thing I've seen that looks remotely workable is completely distributed and open sourced. The problem is setting up the not-for-profit namespace and key registries (assuming the problems above are resolved). How should they be funded? There is no real answer to any of them at the current time though. ____________________________________________________________________ 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 --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------