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No false holographs, was Re: [E-CARM] PKI, CAs, TTPs &c.

On Fri, 27 Mar 1998, Charles W. Gardiner wrote:

>    You ask "By holographic signatures, do you mean handwritten signatures?".
>The answer is yes.  A holograph is "a document wholly in the handwriting of its
>author or the handwriting itself".  Not to be confused with a hologram.  The
>adjectival use is ambiguous, as you note.
>

;-) 

As a laser physicist I holo-disagree with this terminolgy. 
Holography is the technical name for the part of physics that deals
with holograms .. and holographs, as done by holographists. 

Further, linguistically, there is nothing of a "holograph" in a
handwritten signature -- which is entirely localized.

Cryptographically, BTW, a digital signature is much more
"holographic" than a handwritten one, specially because it depends on
the whole document's contents by the hash.

But, and here you should really abandon such use, the name
"holograph" is totally misleading for "a document wholly in the
handwriting of its author or the handwriting itself" because a true
"holographic"  property of an object has the characteristic that any
part of the document can represent the whole object -- which is
clearly NOT the case here.

For example, for a hologram or holograph that deserves its name, even
if you divide it in 100's of pieces, each piece will still be able to
independently represent the whole object. So, a holograph is not
called a holograph just because it represents a "whole", which any
sequence of pictures can do, but because it *indivisibly* represents
such "whole" even in its independent parts.

Not the case of a document which can be shredded for security
reasons... a shredded holograph would certainly represent the same
object in each of its pieces... 


Cheers,

Ed

______________________________________________________________________
Dr.rer.nat. E. Gerck                     egerck@novaware.cps.softex.br
http://novaware.cps.softex.br
    --- Meta-Certificate Group member, http://www.mcg.org.br ---
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