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Re: on the nature of trust
At 10:18 AM -0800 2/13/98, Marc Branchaud wrote:
>Without some externally transmitted trust, what we have is a kind of Turing
>test for trust -- is it really Ed, or just an incredible simulation? This
>might be an easy question to answer in a trivial context, but I think that an
>external trust channel would be needed in a situation of any significance.
I assume that you, like I, only know Ed through his email. Given that, if
he had signed all his posts with one secret key then you trust problem is
greatly simplified:
(1) You must trust the signature system.
(2) You must trust that Ed has not given his secret key to people who are
not authorized to "be Ed".
(3) You must trust that Ed's secret key has not been stolen.
Without the secret key, Mallory can not sign his work as Ed's.
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