> I've blogged on occasion that this is a fuction that shopuld be
> offered as a service by local credit unions and banks.    these
> institutions are required to verify identitiy already; signing and
> uploading a key would be a trivial task for them to add as an
> available service.

Spoken like someone who's never worked in a bank.  ;)

Banks are governed by enormous amounts of bureaucratic regulations.
Getting even small things done requires near-endless amounts of
paperwork.  On top of that, there's the legal liability the bank would
be assuming: if they make an incorrect verification and someone's able
to defraud others, a court of law might consider the bank liable under a
theory of contributory negligence.

There are people on this list who work in the banking industry: I hope
they'll chime in.

> A Secure Operating System is one which will not permit itself to be
> modified by the activity of an application program.     these are 
> available,-- just not used by the "mainstream" .

No, they're not.  You're talking about a unicorn here.  There is
absolutely no operating system that meets this definition.  To do this,
the entire OS would need formal Floyd-Hoare proofs from soup to nuts.

Some years ago there was a big hubbub at USENIX because someone
(Felten?) had formally proved the correctness of an AES256
implementation.  This was considered a heroic feat of hacking.  The only
problem was, nobody had formally proved the correctness of the Java
virtual machine his AES256 code was running on, so in reality he'd
proved nothing.  It was seen as deeply inspiring and deeply Quixotic,
all at once.


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