How about the idea of a secure Internet Relay Chat? A central server might maintain the list of everybody's Public Keys. If you wanted to broadcast a 'public' yet secure msg in a particular room making sure only participants in that room (and not eavesdroppers somewhere else on the wire) could read the msg you could encrypt your broadcast with the server's own Public Key. Send it. The Server receives it, decrypts it, then for each of the participants currently in this particular room, the server encrypts the msg with that person's Public Key and sends it. Private IRC msgs would be treated similarly, except that they'd be re-encrypted only once, for the intended private recipient. Anyone interested on working on this? 0r 1z 1t 2 layme? -- /|n0n1mu$
The problem with central servers is that they are prone to single point failure. That failure may be computer down or key compromise. A good criterion for this kind of design is not to use central servers. This is almost always possible. (Or always possible, depending on who you ask.) There is also the question about getting permission to enter a room, which corresponds to an authentication or a key distribution or a voting algorithm or some sort. You need to know how you want that _social_ interaction to work before you design protocols. You should implement that sociality and test it without encryption to make sure it's what you want. Is this sounding familiar? Eric
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Eric Hughes -
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