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[Amir Herzberg]

James E. Donald said, 

> Amir Herzberg wrote:
> > > Another BTW, the other application I really want
> > > micropayments for (and was my first motivation to this if I
> > > recall correctly) is also crypto-related... it is to motivate
> > > people to produce reviews of products, services, and esp. 
> > > other reviewers - creating a huge `web` (or directed graph)
> > > of credentials. If these are signed, and identify the
> > > reviewed entity by its public key, these credentials are
> > > certificates. Using such a collection of many credentials is
> > > what I believe will be the ultimate solution to public key 
> > > infrastructure - and this is another area I'm very interested
> > > in (and worked on).
> 
> On 15 May 2001, at 11:18, Ben Laurie wrote:
> > I hear what you are saying, but I really don't see how this
> > produces the ultimate solution to PKI - unless you envisage the
> > huge web boiling down to a few very large players that I
> > subcontract my ID requirements to.

No, actually, the trust management decision becomes very decentralized. 
> 
> I interpreted Amir' Herzberg's plan as the Crypto Kong approach to 
> credentials (www.echeque.com/Kong).   If you have a bunch of 
> readily accessible signed documents floating around on the web, 
> you can determine the authenticity of any signed instrument by 
> comparing the signature on one document to other signatures by 
> that person, in those few cases where you actually are concerned 
> about authenticity.

The similarity seems to be only that both are not relying on identity
certificates. But otherwise it's quite a different approach. In our system,
we establish trust by building a graph from available certificates and other
credentials of different entities in the network, and rules for assigning
roles to secret-key holders based on their certificates/credentials and the
role of the issuers of each. This raises a non-trivial, but feasible,
computational problem, resulting in assigning roles to the requestor (as
well as to all the issuers of certificates/credentials of the requestor). 

I'm not involved now in this effort but the project is still ongoing and you
can even download and try out the system. 

Best regards, 
Amir Herzberg
CTO, NewGenPay Inc.  

See demo and lectures/overviews/tutorials on crypto-security for mobile,
e-commerce, etc. in http://www.newgenpay.com/mpay/course/course.html



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