At 12:18 PM -0400 5/22/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>
>
>Yes, the paper isn't that novel; it's very derivative.
It's amusing to see social scientists now busily writing papers on
_facets_ of things we pretty much had scoped out by 1993-4.
Predictable, though.
It'll be interesting when companies start trying to patent the things
we wrote about. Will the public nature of the list, via its many
archives, be sufficient to show prior public art?
>The one interesting
>twist was relying on an algorithm where the factoring can't be easily
>parallelized.
Count me as skeptical that this can be done. A slight amount of
"security through obscurity," but likely to fall once new approaches
to algorithms or architecture happen.
Someone in the mid-90s was proposing a spacecraft be sent out,
beaming back a steady stream of numbers. Once far enough away from
the Earth and moving further each day, the spacecraft would
essentially be tamperproof. The beacon signals from such a departing
spacecraft could be used for interesting purposes, including
timed-release crypto. (Though being deterministic in output, for this
purpose, what would keep a sureptitious copy from being used on Earth
to generate the same stream? One can imagine tight-beam transmissions
_To_ the spacecraft after it was well on its way being used to set up
some sort of eventual key release.
I believe the agoric/distributed approach is more robust and much,
much cheaper.
--Tim May
--
Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
