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1995-10-06 - Re: subjective names and MITM

Header Data

From: Adam Shostack <adam@homeport.org>
To: weidai@eskimo.com (Wei Dai)
Message Hash: 69123f0fa4dccd14ef5dfb009681136c5bd5a57346107f08760dfe00518564e5
Message ID: <199510060021.UAA02958@homeport.org>
Reply To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.951005111048.24409B-100000@eskimo.com>
UTC Datetime: 1995-10-06 00:18:56 UTC
Raw Date: Thu, 5 Oct 95 17:18:56 PDT

Raw message

From: Adam Shostack <adam@homeport.org>
Date: Thu, 5 Oct 95 17:18:56 PDT
To: weidai@eskimo.com (Wei Dai)
Subject: Re: subjective names and MITM
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.951005111048.24409B-100000@eskimo.com>
Message-ID: <199510060021.UAA02958@homeport.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


Wei Dai wrote:

| Perhaps it is better to think of names as subjective identifiers, and
| public keys as global ids.  That is, a person who has a collection of
| public keys gives each of them a name, but different people can name their
| keys differently.  Of course the holder of the corresponding private key
| can help in the naming process (e.g., "Please call me Wei").  If two
| people need to talk about a third party, they can refer to him by an
| arbitrary name after establishing a common binding between his key and
| that name. 

	Just a minor nit regarding a well thought out post, public
keys are not 'global' ids, but 'system-wide' IDs.  For keys to be
really global, there needs to be a mechanism in place for insuring
that key ids are very probably unique.  One way to ensure that keys
are globally unique would be to integrate a KCA identifier with the
keyid, and KCAs base part of their reputation on not signing multiple
keys with the same id.

Adam

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume

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