Re: Gov't eyes public-key infrastructure

>>The U.S. government intends to operate a public-key certification
>>system for government users that will also serve the private sector,
>>as well. But a report just completed by Mitre Corp. for the National
>>Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) puts the price tag at
>>$1 billion for the start-up of the government alone, with a possible
>>$2 billion annual operational cost for managing certificate-revocation
>>lists.
>
>All in all, I'd say this is a pretty good argument for PGP's web of trust
>model...

Especially given that urban folklore about everyone being only 5 hops away
on the network of life. I.e. Everyone is a friend of a friend of a friend of
a friend of a friend of anyone else. This was sort of troped upon in "6 degrees
of Separation", the John Guare movie/play. 

If anyone had any concrete data about this, then it might be interesting to 
calculate the optimum number of people you should get to cosign your public
key. 
Anyone remember enough about Ramsey numbers and Graph Theory? 

-Peter

>
>Phil

> From: pcw@access.digex.net (Peter Wayner)

> Especially given that urban folklore about everyone being only 5 hops away
> on the network of life. I.e. Everyone is a friend of a friend of a friend of
> a friend of a friend of anyone else.

The factoid I heard was that if we're randomly chosen people, there
a ~99% chance that I have a friend who has a friend who's your friend.
Dropping one hop, to require us to have a friend in common, reduces
the probability to something very small.

   Eli   ebrandt@hmc.edu

But I probably heard this from a FOAF.

| The factoid I heard was that if we're randomly chosen people, there
| a ~99% chance that I have a friend who has a friend who's your friend.
| Dropping one hop, to require us to have a friend in common, reduces
| the probability to something very small.

	The research was done by Stanley Milgram in the late 60's.
(Milgram was the guy who did the 'authority experiments' where a man
in a white coat urged subjects to deliver what they thought was a high
voltage shock to a victim.)

	He handed out books of postcards, and asked that they be
delivered to someone wiht whom he was cooperating.  (An example would
be "Reverend Joe Smith in Phoenix, Arizona).  People were asked to
pass the book on to someone they felt would be able to hand it to Rev
Smith.  At each pass, people were asked to mail in a post card.  The
average for the US was 6 post cards.

	I might be able to dig out references to this if folks really
want.

Adam


-- 
Adam Shostack 				       adam@bwh.harvard.edu

Politics.  From the greek "poly," meaning many, and ticks, a small,
annoying bloodsucker.