Maybe It's Snake Oil All the Way Down
James A. Donald
jamesd at echeque.com
Wed Jun 4 16:25:28 PDT 2003
--
Everyone in America has several shared secrets identifying them
-- the number of the beast to identify them to the state, and
their credit card numbers identifying them to various financial
institutions, plus a hundred passwords to login to their
email, their bank, their network provider, e-gold, etc.
The PKI idea was that we would instead use PK in place of
shared secrets, but if an ordinary person had a private key,
what could he use it for?
The spam that seeks to get us to login to e-g0ld and the
BankOf4merica.com works because the logins are based on shared
secrets, not private keys, and the networks are setup to rely
on shared secrets because there is no practical alternative.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
r9lUivpSt7tWiPOxVr17a9sjkgXnnbC5matqsa6/
4UovWiFVbzH8bFEhVsekeydmrrDmez+5/B/3ZSo4B
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