Adam Shostack <adam@bwh.harvard.edu> writes:
Are there papers out there on reputation capital that I should be familiar with before talking about it? I have a bunch of ideas, but would like to review the lit before presenting any of them, so I don't repeat things that have been talked about, and don't make any dumb mistakes. I checked the index of AC, and also looked in the bibliography under Chaum but did not see anything.
I seem to recall a posting in outline form by Dean Tribble to this list about 1 1/2 years ago. It was some notes he had used in a presentation to a CP meeting. Maybe someone could dig it out again. I don't think Chaum has particularly used the term or even discussed the issue that much. It doesn't seem like it is an issue which is talked about in many places. Your ideas are probably as much worth hearing as anyone's. Hal Finney P.S. I did find a paper on the net called "Endorsements, Licensing, and Insurance for Distributed System Services", by Lai, Medvinsky, and Newman of Information Sciences Institute. Here is the abstract: "Clients in a distributed system place their confidence in many servers, and servers themselves rely on other servers for file storage, authentication, authorization, and payment. When a system spans administrative boundaries it becomes harder to assess the security and competence of potential service providers. This paper examines the issue of confidence in large distributed systems. "When confidence is lacking in the 'real world,' one relies on endorsements, licensing, insurance, and surety bonds to compensate. We show that by incorporating such assurances into a distributed system, users are better able to evaluate the risks incurred when using a particular server. This paper describes a method to electronically represent endorsements, licenses, and insurance policies, and discusses the means by which clients use such items when selecting service providers." Unfortunately, I can't recall where I saw the pointer to this paper. I'm sure other people read the same lists and newsgroups I do so perhaps someone else can provide a pointer. Also, my copy of the postscript paper would only print the first three pages, so I can't really evaluate their ideas.