Thanks for the living hell, and question about OpenSSL
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Sincere thanks to everyone for the living hell I went through yesterday. I do understand the rationale for blinding now. The math was never the problem. I was mistakenly thinking that because my sacred code did not in fact record any IP-based transmission logs, users were safe as far as anonymity and privacy were concerned. What I missed was that if someone put a gun to my head and said "Put in some code to keep transmission logs and don't tell anybody or I'll kill your family," I would in fact obey and the security of the system would be compromised without anyone knowing. As RAH says, force monopolies are a bitch. So I'm taking blinding under my wing and working out some example scenarios of exactly how a system might work. I want to be able to describe it to novices. For example, you go to the post office and ship 10 gold coins to such-and-such bank. After they receive the coins, you fire up this program on your computer and do this-and-that. Then to transmit value to your friend in Helsinki, you do this other thing over here. Then your friend in Helsinki fires up a program and does such-and-such, and three days later 7 gold coins appear on his doorstep. That kind of thing. Something that makes a roomful of people who know nothing about modular arithmetic brighten up and think "Hey, I really think I could *use* that." On a technical note, I really like what I see at http://openssl.org and I'm mucking around with it as a possible platform. Does anybody have any comments or concerns regarding the suitability of OpenSSL for the purposes we are discussing here? - -- Patrick http://fexl.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 iQA/AwUBPql8dlA7g7bodUwLEQKZVACgsNa3EpC7JbZU8uG2HiSmwuj91MoAoL4Z h5uLPRjXdbdOtCCTsclCAy8X =YlsU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Friday, April 25, 2003, at 11:20 AM, Patrick Chkoreff wrote:
Sincere thanks to everyone for the living hell I went through yesterday.
I do understand the rationale for blinding now. The math was never the problem. I was mistakenly thinking that because my sacred code did not in fact record any IP-based transmission logs, users were safe as far as anonymity and privacy were concerned. What I missed was that if someone put a gun to my head and said "Put in some code to keep transmission logs and don't tell anybody or I'll kill your family," I would in fact obey and the security of the system would be compromised without anyone knowing. As RAH says, force monopolies are a bitch.
More importantly, if there is any way for you to track digital money, then whether you _claim_ to be "not recording" or not is irrelevant. Without blinding (or similar), a system is just another "trust me" system. And "trust me" systems are not interesting. Not meaning to sound too harsh, but you need to think deeply about what cryptography is all about and why "trust me, I promise not to look" systems are not desirable or interesting. (The cipher equivalent of your "because my sacred code did not in fact record any IP-based transmission logs" is just the usual central key server example: "Digital Datawhack generates keys for its customers but does not in fact record them." Yeah, right.) --Tim May "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship." --Alexander Fraser Tyler
participants (2)
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Patrick Chkoreff -
Tim May