Anton Stiglic wrote: > > >We need a practical system for anonymous/pseudonymous > > >credentials. Can somebody tell us, what's the state of > > >the art? What's currently deployed? What's on the > > >drawing boards? > > > > The state of the art, AFAIK, is Chaum's credential system. > > The state of the art is Brands' credentials.
Thanks for clearing up the record there - it was also my understanding that Brands' work was the current theoretical state of the art! In terms of actual "practical" systems, ones that implement to Brands' level don't exist, as far as I know? Also, the use of Brands work would need to consider that he holds a swag of patents over it all (as also applies to all of the Chaum concepts). There is an alternate approach, the E/capabilities world. Capabilities probably easily support the development of psuedonyms and credentials, probably more easily than any other system. But, it would seem that the E development is still a research project, showing lots of promise, not yet breaking out into the wider applications space. A further alternate is what could be called the hard-coded psuedonym approach as characterised by SOX. (That's the protocol that my company wrote, so normal biases expected.) This approach builds psuedonyms from the ground up, which results in a capabilities model like E, but every separate use of the capability must be then re-coded in hard lines by hardened coders. Which means, for example, that whilst the E crowd can knock up a new capability over lunchtime, it takes us about a year of hard work to get a new capability in place (we've done several - payments, messaging, trading, projects, ...). The plus side is that these capabilities are far more suited to purpose than something built over a high level platform. In summary, the state of the art would seem to be just that, an art in a state. There is no clear view as to how this will pan out in the future, to my mind. iang --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]