On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 11:41:02AM -0700, Eric Cordian wrote:
cryptography is fundamentally a trust-based system. With the rise of the Internet, and almost all crypto being done by people who do not physically meet to exchange keys, almost all crypto is public key crypto.
Therefore, almost all cryptography (at the present moment) is based on trust.
Right. But there's still a difference between: * I trust that my computer has not been black-bagged (because I've checked, or have steps to prevent that, or it would require more effort from my adversary than I'm worth) * I trust that the current state of the art in terms of factoring in the public literature is within several orders of magnitude of what's in the classified literature. And: * I trust Paypal or Microsoft Hotmail to guard my privacy at all costs when faced with an urgent, secret request from John Aschroft. -Declan