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RE: [Asrg] [IP] A Simpler, More Personal Key to Protect Online Me ssages

2003-07-07 14:14:22
I finally got full net access (was on the RIM earlier)

This does look like a legit firm, it is identity based cryptography.

However it is unlikely to affect us since our problem is authentication
and not encryption. In an encryption scheme you have to know the
recipient's email before you send a message, hence the need for identity
based cryptography or a directory.

To authenticate you can send a certificate inband, so the problem that
is being solved is not really relevant to us.

                Phill

-----Original Message-----
From: Yakov Shafranovich [mailto:research(_at_)solidmatrix(_dot_)com]
Sent: Monday, July 07, 2003 3:46 PM
To: Hallam-Baker, Phillip; 'gep2(_at_)terabites(_dot_)com'; 
'asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org'
Subject: Re: [Asrg] [IP] A Simpler, More Personal Key to 
Protect Online
Me ssages


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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+420 
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/17
drop.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/a2gsg/



------ End of Forwarded Message

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<----  End Forwarded Message  ---->

Gordon Peterson                  http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002  Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support the Anti-SPAM Amendment!  Join at http://www.cauce.org/
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they
"represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in
America.



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