Hi, maybe someone can give me a hint to explain something:
Someone was writing an article in context of communication and network security. The article contained a chapter about the need to distinguish between the payload and informations needed to provide the service, such as addresses etc. The chapter started with a few lines of introduction, where the author said something like "When doing a phone call, phone numbers must be transmitted, and signals about the state of the connection as well." Now a german professor of computer science, who claims to be a cryptographer, denied this in a way which I translate to english like this: "This is a wrong statement about the technical details. It is wrong to claim, that, when doing phone calls, phone numbers must be transmitted. The author seems to take only the currently practiced ISDN protocols into consideration and ignored that, e.g. in particular for Packet Switched Networking with Public Key Addressing, as researched by Donald Davies as the original fundament for the introduction of Packet Switched Networks, especially this problem was to be bypassed/avoided." He must obviously have confused something. It is commonly known that the old analog phones had a dial as well. Public Key Cryptography (since he is talking in context of cryptography, I presume that "Public Key Addressing" is supposed to mean anything with Public Key Cryptography) was invented in the seventies, while Packet Switched Networks were developed in the sixties. Until now, I couldn't find any hint what Donald Davies could have done which could be called Public Key Adressing. The professor himself refuses any statement. Does anybody have any idea, even an absurd one, what could the professor have driven to this conclusion and what he could have meant with Public Key Addressing? regards Hadmut --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]