The original NY Times article has this relevant quote from Bruce Schneier:
"A second challenge will be that in an increasingly online world,
public-key systems have become far easier to use, said Bruce Schneier, a
cryptography expert who is founder and chief technical officer of
Counterpane Internet Security. "Nowadays its easy to look up a key," he
said. "That has been solved by ubiquitous Internet access."
At 12:03 PM 7/7/2003 -0700, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
This sounds like it is an identity based encryption scheme although it could
also be snakeoil.
You can think of this as a scheme where someones public key is a simple
function of their email address. This means that there is no need for
directory infrastructure etc.
The drawback is that to make the scheme work you have to have a way of
distributing peoples private keys from a central issuer. There is no way to
revoke public keys either.
Most people seem to want to generate their own keypairs and never reveal the
private key. In practice running a directory infrastructure is not a real
problem. Running x500 is a problem, but dns srv records pointing to an xkms
server would work fine.
-----Original Message-----
From: Yakov Shafranovich
Sent: Mon Jul 07 11:44:05 2003
To: gep2(_at_)terabites(_dot_)com; asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: [Asrg] [IP] A Simpler, More Personal Key to Protect
Online Messages
Its described in detail at:
http://crypto.stanford.edu/ibe/
At 12:26 PM 7/7/2003 0500, gep2(_at_)terabites(_dot_)com wrote:
>I thought this was interesting... any implications for us here?
>
>One obvious issue is how this handles things like mailing lists and
>digests and
>such which group messages from many different original senders, and where
>each
>original sender has no idea of the E-mail address of the ultimate
destination
>recipients. (Would it be sufficient for the list software to decode and
>re-encode messages being processed? But then they'd need to re-encode
>separately for each digest recipient...)
>
>
>
><---- Begin Forwarded Message ---->
>Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 04:10:17 -0400
>Subject: [IP] A Simpler, More Personal Key to Protect Online Messages
>From: Dave Farber <dave(_at_)farber(_dot_)net>
>To: ip <ip(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com>
>Reply-To: dave(_at_)farber(_dot_)net
>
>
>------ Forwarded Message
>From: "the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow" <geoff(_at_)iconia(_dot_)com>
>Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 09:46:24 +0200
>To: "Dave E-mail Pamphleteer Farber" <farber(_at_)cis(_dot_)upenn(_dot_)edu>
>Subject: A Simpler, More Personal Key to Protect Online Messages
>
>A Simpler, More Personal Key to Protect Online Messages
>
>By JOHN MARKOFF
>The New York Times
>
>PALO ALTO, Calif., July 6 - A Silicon Valley start-up company on Tuesday
>plans to unveil a new approach to sending secure electronic messages and
>protecting data, a simpler alternative to current encryption systems, which
>use long digital numbers, called public keys.
>
>The new company, Voltage Security, which is based here, instead uses
another
>unique identifier as the public key: the message recipient's e-mail
address.
>
>Under the Voltage system, the sender of a message uses software that
>converts the recipient's e-mail address into a number and then encrypts the
>message using a mathematical formula. The recipient can then use a similar
>formula in conjunction with a secret key to decode the message. The company
>says it would be almost impossible for an eavesdropper to use the formula.
>The software can be used with several existing PC e-mail programs.
>
>--snip--
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/07/technology/07CODE.html
>
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603 706 558
>"success is getting what you want & happiness is wanting what you get"
>http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/01/biztech/articles/17drop.html
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>
>
>
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>
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><---- End Forwarded Message ---->
>
>Gordon Peterson http://personal.terabites.com/
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