Re: Who needs time vaults anyway?

>An application that I've seen is financial data, more specifically
>MBS payment info.

In the real world, there's a trustee/nominee of some sort who does this.
What's that to keep that from happening on the net, just like our much
maligned (guy's gotta make a living, fer chrissake!) assassination-payoff
escrow agent...


Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131
USA (617) 958-3971
"Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell
>>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf@clark.net  http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<

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In article <v02120d05accab753260f@[199.0.65.105]>,
Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> wrote:
> In the real world, there's a trustee/nominee of some sort who does this.
> What's that to keep that from happening on the net, just like our much
> maligned (guy's gotta make a living, fer chrissake!) assassination-payoff
> escrow agent...

Note that with event-release crypto, the houses could make a public key
available, with the secret key to be held until the death of Tom Target.
That key pair could be used by any of its anonymous buyers while the
crypto house remained ignorant not only of the content and authorship
of the messages, but even of the messages' existance -- nothing at all
to subpoena.  The same key could be used by Tom to encrypt his will, by
the assassin's employer to encrypt the payment, and by anyone to place
a bet on whether Tom will die within a certain period of time (by using
ecash that expires, like Digicash).

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-- 
Shields.

Tasteless joke. Do not take seriously.

On Sat, 11 Nov 1995, Robert Hettinga wrote:

> What's that to keep that from happening on the net, just like our much
> maligned (guy's gotta make a living, fer chrissake!) assassination-payoff
> escrow agent...

Oh you must mean those wily hackers at Digicrime. Way to go Matt. 
My server originally had trouble looking up the host; must have been some 
last-ditch effort by those spooks at SAIC (I did note some recent obituaries
and resignations on their board, heheh...). It's all fine now though.

Excellent means of gaining employment and weapons practice. Gives new 
meaning to the phrase "affirmative action hiring". (though I still haven't seen 
my last check in the mail, guys. Hint, hint, hint.)

Just wondering, does the company presently have a market quote for 
captive CS profs? (shaddup over there! stop counting primes already)

Looking forward to the forthcoming Blacknet Unspeakable Comm-Oddities 
Exchange (a rather nice slant on AMIX, eh?). (still selling those babies, 
Tim?)

On Sat, 11 Nov 1995, Robert Hettinga wrote:

> In the real world, there's a trustee/nominee of some sort who does this.
> What's that to keep that from happening on the net, just like our much
> maligned (guy's gotta make a living, fer chrissake!) assassination-payoff
> escrow agent...

Nothing really;  It would probably be better to do some sort of secret 
sharing and use a number of somewhat trusted escrow-agents, but the 
protocols aren't too complex. 

For the simple case where the release is time based, you could even make 
the process totally automatic; just have the escrow agents send off their 
bits of the key when the time has expired, and voila.

As for real time-release - how about just using conventional encryption, 
and require it to be brute-forced?

Depending on how fine grained you want the release to be, you could also 
take the inverse of Moore's law, work out how big a key you need to have 
it unbreakable in less than the desired time, add in whatever fudge 
factors you feel like based on how much it would be worth to the opponent 
to get early access, then lock up the secret and throw away the key. 

Simon

On Sat, 11 Nov 1995, Simon Spero wrote:

> Depending on how fine grained you want the release to be, you could also 
> take the inverse of Moore's law, work out how big a key you need to have 
> it unbreakable in less than the desired time, add in whatever fudge 
> factors you feel like based on how much it would be worth to the opponent 
> to get early access, then lock up the secret and throw away the key. 
> 
> Simon
> 

The main problem I would see with this scheme is that it uses Moore's law.
I do not think that Moore's law will hold true forever.  Microchips are
becoming so small that they will eventually reach a point where they will
not be able to be any smaller without facing quantum uncertainty.  At
this point, either the increase in computer speed will stop or something
like parallel processing or quantum computers will become feasible and the
amount of compute time will be very little.  Using this type of scheme
might be usefull now, but most likely, a new law about increasing computer
power will have to be developed in the next twenty years.
   
--
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Public Key/1024: 0xF9B22BA5 BD 24 D0 8E 3C BB 53 47  20 54 FA 56 00 22 58 D5
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