careful, somebody might think you are playing ringer for aads chip strawman http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#aadsstraw and aSuretee http://www.ausretee.com/
slight quibble .... establish authentication with public key cryptography ... mixing up identification and authentication can get really messy. -- Internet trivia, 20th anv: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm todd boyle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 6/12/2003 4:26 pm wrote: Public key cryptography is quite usable for the problem of enabling competent, willful individuals to prove their identity and other assertions over networks. Of course there are no secure devices in common use that can't be hacked in seconds by hackers of sufficient skill. But that is another problem. Public key cryptography is much less useful in addressing the problem of organizations and governments to positively identify unwilling, recalcitrant citizens at the other end of a network connection. PKI's not working for that, and neither will anything else ever work for that. You cannot control what is at the other end of an electric wire. Only the other person can control that. Oh, you can win their cooperation in some interaction they *decide* to participate in. And you can even make them "an offer they cannot refuse." But you're never really going to achieve net gain with a machine with a network, with customers tethered to the network. Organizations are accustomed to earning long term, recurring cash flows from physical buildings, physical employees watched over by managers, and procedures of internal control, that's not going to happen when the "organization" is a supreme computer with no employees. There is no magic protocol, no crypto, that will achieve this. Accordingly banks should put in hands of their customers, an honest signing device and forget their dreams of pki empire, Todd
