Hi Ian, I will just respond to one of the many excellent points you’ve made.
On 2014-04-29, at 12:12 PM, ianG <i...@iang.org> wrote: > On 29/04/2014 17:14 pm, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote: >> People do trust their browsers and OSes to maintain a list of trustworthy >> CAs. > > No they don't. Again, you are taking the words from the sold-model. I will explain my words below. > People don't have a clue what a trustworthy CA is, in general. I emphatically agree with you. I hadn’t meant to imply otherwise. I have been using “trust” in a sort of behavioral way. For the sake of the next few sentences, I’m going to introduce some terrible terminology. “b-trust” is my “behavioral trust” which will defined in terms of “c-trust” (“cognitive”). So let’s say that A c-trusts B wrt to X when A is confident that B will act in way X. (Cut me some slack on “act”). A “b-trusts” B wrt to X when she behaves as if she c-trusts B wrt to X. So when I say that users trust their browsers to maintain a list of trustworthy CAs, I am speaking of “b-trust”. They may have no conscious idea or understanding what they are actually trusting or why it is (or isn’t) worthy of their trust. But they *behave* this way. A vampire bat may b-trust that its rook mates will give it a warm meal if necessary. Life is filled with such trust relations even where there is no c-trust. > (c.f., the *real meaning of trust* being a human decision to take a risk > on available information.) Which is what I am talking about. And I’m talking about it because it is what matters for human behavior. And I want a system that works for humans. I see that you’ve written on financial cryptography. Well think about conventional currency works. For all its problems currency works, and it is a system that requires “trust”. But only a negligible fraction of the people who successfully use the system do so through c-trust. It may well be that all of the problems with TLS are because the system is trying to work for agents who don’t understand how the system works. But, as I said at the beginning, that is the world we are living in. Cheers, -j _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
