At 04:20 25/12/2003, Carl Ellison wrote: ...
If you want to use cryptography for e-commerce, then IMHO you need a
contract signed on paper, enforced by normal contract law, in which one
party lists the hash of his public key (or the whole public key) and says
that s/he accepts liability for any digitally signed statement that can be
verified with that public key.
Of course! I fully agree; in fact the first phase in the `trusted delivery layer` protocols I'm working on is exactly that - ensuring that the parties (using some external method) agreed on the keys and the resulting liability. But when I define the specifications, I use `non-repudiation` terms for some of the requirements. For example, the intuitive phrasing of the Non-Repudiation of Origin (NRO) requirement is: if any party outputs an evidence evid s.t. valid(agreement, evid, sender, dest, message, time-interval, NRO), then either the sender is corrupted or sender originated message to the destination dest during the indicated time-interval. Notice of course that sender here is an entity in the protocol, not the human being `behind` it. Also notice this is only intuitive description, not the formal specifications.
What you have here is evidence of origin, not non-repudiation.
Cheers,
Ben.
-- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/
"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff
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