James A. Donald wrote: > For PKI to have all these wonderful benefits, everyone > needs his own certificate. But the masses have not come > to the party, in part because of the rather Orwellian > requirements. Obviously I cannot get a certificate > testifying that I am the one true James Donald, because > I probably am not. So I have to get a certificate > saying I am the one true James Donald SS xxx-xx-xxxx - > the number of the beast.
the real issue in the early 90s ... was that the real authoritative agencies weren't certifying one true identity ... and issuing certificates representing such one true identity ... in part because there was some liability issues if somebody depended on the information ... and it turned out to be wrong. there was talk in the early 90s of independent 3rd party trust organizations scene and claimed that they would check with the official bodies as to the validity of the information ... and then certify that they had done that checking ... and issue a public key certificate indicating that they had done such checking (they weren't actually certifying the validaty of the information ... they were certifying that they had checked with somebody else regarding the validaty of the information). the issue of these independent 3rd party trust organizations was that they wan'ted to make money off of certifying that they had checked with the real organizations as to the validaty of the information ... and they way they were going to make this money was by selling public key digital certificates indicating that they had done such checking. the issue then came up was what sort of information would be of value to relying parties ... that should be checked on and included in a digital certificate as having been checked. It started to appear that the more personal information that was included ... the more value it would be to relying parties ... not just your name ... but name, ancestry, address, and loads of other characteristics (the time of stuff that relying parties might get if they did a real-time check with credit agency). one of the characteristics of the public key side of these digital certificates ... was that they could be freely distributed and published all over the world. by the mid-90s, institutions were starting to realize that such public key digital certificates ... freely published and distributed all over the world with enormous amounts of personal information represented significant privacy and liability issues. you can also consider that if there was such enormous amounts of personal information ... the certificate was no longer being used for just authenticating the person ... but was, in fact, identifying the person (another way of viewing the significant privacy and liability issues). as a result, you started seeing institutions issuing relying-party-only certificates in this time frame http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#rpo which contained just a public key and some sort of database or account lookup value ... where all the real information of interest to the institution was kept. the public key technology ... in the form of digital signature verification, would be used to authenticate the entity ... and the account lookup would establish association with all the necessary real-time information of interest to the institution. this had the beneficial side-effect of reverting public key operations to purely authentication operations ... as opposed to straying into the horrible privacy and liability issues related to constantly identifying the entity. however, it became trivial to prove that relying-party-only certificates are redundant and superfluos ... with all the real-time information of interest for the instittution on file (including the public key) ... and the entity digitally signing some sort of transaction which already included the database/account lookup value ... there was no useful additional information represented by the relying-party-only certificate ... that the relying party didn't already have (by definition, the public key was registered with the relying party as prelude to issuing any digital certificate ... but if the public key had to already be registered, then the issuing of the digital certificate became redundant and superfluous). this was also in the era where the EU data privacy directive was pushing that names be removed from various payment card instruments doing online electronic fund transactions. If the payment card is purely a "something you have" piece of authentication ... then it should be possible to perform a transactions w/o also requiring identification. as to the 2nd part ... passwords are a shared-secret, based, intrenched institutional-centric technology. it requires lot less technology infrastructure to support a shared-secret password based operation. this was ok back in the mar, 1970 ... when i got my first permanent home terminal with userid/password login to the office computer ... and i only had a single pin/password. however, as the decades passed ... the number of shared-secret password/pin based environments proliferated to the point where i now have to deal with scores of different values ... all of which i'm suppose to theoritically have memorized, each one of them being unique from the others ... and potentially have to be changed montly. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]