1995-01-25 - Re: Shell’s authentication needs

Header Data

From: “James A. Donald” <jamesd@netcom.com>
To: Jonathan Rochkind <jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu>
Message Hash: dec4bc637ad69c8d7eacb0edf3d77df59d0a5426543022e910a7b85b15b75aff
Message ID: <Pine.3.89.9501241855.A1068-0100000@netcom10>
Reply To: <ab4b3db603021004cb5d@[132.162.201.201]>
UTC Datetime: 1995-01-25 02:44:20 UTC
Raw Date: Tue, 24 Jan 95 18:44:20 PST

Raw message

From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 95 18:44:20 PST
To: Jonathan Rochkind <jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu>
Subject: Re: Shell's authentication needs
In-Reply-To: <ab4b3db603021004cb5d@[132.162.201.201]>
Message-ID: <Pine.3.89.9501241855.A1068-0100000@netcom10>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On Tue, 24 Jan 1995, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> It's not as elegant as time stamping, because you really need face-to-face
> contact. And you need to trust the stamper not to lie about his location (I
> can't remember how much you need to trust a time-stamper, but I think it's
> less).

You do not need to trust the time stamper at all, because from time
to time he publishes a one way checksum of everything he has
time stamped, or rather the audit trail for everything he
has time stamped.

So if the credibility of his stamp is questioned he just produces
the audit trail, and you know that the audit trail must have 
been created at the time claimed, because its checksum was
published at the time claimed.


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