From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Sun, 12 May 1996 09:08:34 +0800
To: bryce@digicash.com
Subject: Re: need nym-differentiation, perpetual motion, and FTL travel please
In-Reply-To: <199605111923.VAA07367@digicash.com>
Message-ID: <199605111942.PAA07516@jekyll.piermont.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



bryce@digicash.com writes:
> Okay having said I couldn't think of a good way, I'll go
> ahead and suggest a way.
> 
> Let's assume that it is possible to stop people from
> pretending to be anyone in Real Life(tm).  (It is possible.)

How? Identity police taking genetic samples from every person on the
planet six times a day?

Even that can't prevent me from going to a corner pay phone and
calling someone and saying I am Ignatz Ratkin.

> Now let's collect N people and form a Dining-Cryptographers'
> net.  Once the Dining-Cryptographers' net is up-and-running
> let's put out a call for each of the N participants to
> announce a public key which will be their nym from now on.
> Assuming that you get N public keys, you can have _some_
> degree of assurance that there is a one-to-one mapping
> between pubkeys/nyms and humans on the DC-Net.

And how do you catch the person who tries to send out two keys?

.pm