Re: History and definition of the term 'principal'?

2006-04-26 Thread Sean W. Smith
I like the definition in Kaufman-Perlman-Speciner: A completely generic term used by the security community to include both people and computer systems. Coined because it is more dignified than 'thingy' and because 'object' and 'entity' (which also means thingy) were already overused.

Re: History and definition of the term 'principal'?

2006-04-26 Thread Hadmut Danisch
Hi, On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 03:18:40PM -0400, Sean W. Smith wrote: I like the definition in Kaufman-Perlman-Speciner: A completely generic term used by the security community to include both people and computer systems. Coined because it is more dignified than 'thingy' and because

Re: History and definition of the term 'principal'?

2006-04-26 Thread Victor Duchovni
On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 06:33:43PM +0200, Hadmut Danisch wrote: Some say a principal is someone who participates in a cryptographical protocol. The way I see it, the common English sense is direct participant, not a third party. During TGS requests the Kerberos KDC is a *principal* in the TGS

RE: History and definition of the term 'principal'?

2006-04-26 Thread tmcghan
from: http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/publications.html Perspectives on Financial Cryptography (Revisited) by Ronald L. Rivest. Financial Cryptography '06 Conference Keynote. (Update of talk given for Financial Cryptography '97) PowerPoint presentation excerpt follows: SDSI's active agents

Re: History and definition of the term 'principal'?

2006-04-26 Thread Anne Lynn Wheeler
Victor Duchovni wrote: So with Kerberos the word hasW its narrower named security entity technical meaning. With X.509 one tends to talk of subjects, issuers, registration authorities, certification authorities, ... and the word principal is less common. part of this has been that x.509 has

Re: History and definition of the term 'principal'?

2006-04-26 Thread Steven M. Bellovin
On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 18:33:43 +0200, Hadmut Danisch [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I need to solve a dispute. Someone claims, that 'principal' is an established 'concept' introduced by Roger Needhams, but could not give any citation. Someone else confirms this and claims, that 'principal' is

PGP master keys

2006-04-26 Thread Steven M. Bellovin
In an article on disk encryption (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/26/pgp_infosec/), the following paragraph appears: BitLocker has landed Redmond in some hot water over its insistence that there are no back doors for law enforcement. As its encryption code is open

Re: History and definition of the term 'principal'?

2006-04-26 Thread Sean W. Smith
Are there different editions of Kaufman-Perlman-Speciner ? I got that definition from the glossary in the 2nd edition. I'm pretty sure it was in the glossary in the first edition as well, but I can't seem to find my copy anymore!