dangers of TCPA/palladium

Anton Stiglic stiglic at cs.mcgill.ca
Tue Aug 6 07:33:32 PDT 2002


----- Original Message -----
From: "AARG!Anonymous" <remailer at aarg.net>
To: <adam at cypherspace.org>; <cypherpunks at lne.com>;
<cryptography at wasabisystems.com>
Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 7:25 PM
Subject: Re: dangers of TCPA/palladium


> Adam Back writes:
> > To address privacy with for example Brands digital credentials, the
> > underlying cryptography may be harder to understand, or at least less
> > familiar, but I don't think using a toolkit based on Brands digital
> > credentials would be significantly harder than using an identity or
> > attribute based PKI toolkit.  Similar for Chaum's credentials or other
> > approach.
>
> Sure, but how many pages would it take in the spec to describe the
> protocol?  Especially given their turgid technical-writer prose?
> Brands took a whole book to describe his credentials thoroughly.

Not many pages at all.  See the description of practical protocols
for private credentials here
http://crypto.cs.mcgill.ca/~stiglic/Papers/brands.pdf

The paper is not longer than Ben Laurie's write up of Lucre, and in
my point of view just as readable.

Of course it doesn't give details on the formatting of messages and
other stuff (you won't find that in most descriptions of blind signatures
protocols or Lucre either), but these can easily be added.  There is enough
information for developer who has basic knowledge in crypto to
understand what an implementation of the scheme would look like, and
also to validate an existing implementation of the particular protocols
described.

Brands' book is long and very technical because he describes in it many
variations of his protocols and provides detailed proofs of security for
each
protocol.  For a more simple reading that provides intuition and motivation
for the technology read Stefan Brands' paper "A Technical Overview of
Digital Credentials",
http://www.xs4all.nl/~brands/overview.pdf


--Anton






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