--- begin forwarded text X-Sender: kentborg@pop.tiac.net Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 11:42:25 -0400 To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> From: Kent Borg <kentborg@borg.org> Subject: FYI: Tygar talk on Monday, November 3 at Harvard Mime-Version: 1.0 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Having recently come out of retirement (my temporary early retirement, longer than I would have dreamed I could have pulled off, was wonderful), I have not hit upon a smooth stride in my email reading techniques. Riding the bus (most) every day means that I am going to be running up to date on my Herald Tribune, Economist, Byte, Science News, Scientific American, etc., but I am behind on such things as the DCSB mailing list. So I don't know whether this has gone by on the list, you might want to send it out:

From: rivest@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Ron Rivest) Date: Fri, 24 Oct 97 11:29:49 EDT To: cis-seminars@theory.lcs.mit.edu Subject: FYI: Tygar talk on Monday, November 3 at Harvard

Harvard University Computer Science Colloquium Series

Atomicity in Electronic Commerce

Doug Tygar Computer Science Department Carnegie Mellon University

Monday, November 3, 1997 4 PM Pierce Hall 209 (Tea at 5 pm Brooks Room)

Abstract

The explosion of the Internet has brought with it a desire to allow information goods to be bought or sold over the network. Several schemes for realizing this have been proposed over the last year, and there are a number of commercial ventures to support electronic commerce.

In the first part of this talk, I examine several protocols for electronic commerce from the perspective of the distributed transactions. Most models of electronic commerce have presumed a highly-available error-free network. I argue for a more realistic model of commerce using notions of atomicity in electronic commerce, and propose three levels of atomic transactions. I will discuss how to exploit network failures to explicitly attack commercially used protocols and fraudulently obtain goods or money.

In the second part of the talk, I will discuss two very different approaches to achieving high degrees of atomicity: the first, an internet billing system called NetBill is being used to allow highly atomic microtransactions of information goods. This technology has recently been licensed for commercial use. The second approach, Information Based Indicia, uses secure coprocessor hardware to ensure atomicity, and is being adopted by the US Postal Service to address their problem of theft of postage through counterfeit postage indicia.

Host: Professor Michael Rabin

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQA/AwUBNFDB4dL/GwYma/g5EQIziQCbBjVOiEzn11yQKX0htHS2cVCPZJ8AoMXM aMpfEIV0cYxcgdmFgLV0gmD6 =jeyE -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Kent Borg kentborg@borg.org W: +1-781-768-2300 x1741 H: +1-617-776-6899 "The creative instinct has always been a stronger motive than mere profit to do truly new and revolutionary things." - Phil Karn --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>