greg@ideath.goldenbear.com (Greg Broiles) said:

It's not clear to me how you can trust systems not under your control to report on themselves or local conditions accurately. As your program gets more complex, aren't you going to run into an analog of the Turing machine/halting problem?

The idea is to encode the important-to-be-trusted features of the software and the inter-machine protocol handshake together into the equivalent of a Goedel number which acts as a public key during the protocol handshake, so that any change to that core encoding of the functionality would have the side effect that it was no longer able to communicate.

It's an intriguing idea, but it's still very unclear to me how it might work on software of any real complexity.

Yeah...I'm having strong difficulties with doing it in a way that is computationally feasible as well as theoretically sound. Several times I thought I'd found the right approach but then found holes in it. So I lied in implying that I really did have a final algorithm....I *thought* I did, but I was wrong. Doug