Public Key Addressing?

[Hadmut Danisch]

Hi,

maybe someone can give me a hint to explain something:


Someone was writing an article in context of 
communication and network security. The article
contained a chapter about the need to distinguish
between the payload and informations needed to 
provide the service, such as addresses etc.
The chapter started with a few lines of introduction, where
the author said something like

  "When doing a phone call, phone numbers must be
  transmitted, and signals about the state of the
  connection as well."


Now a german professor of computer science, who
claims to be a cryptographer, denied this in 
a way which I translate to english like this:

  "This is a wrong statement about the technical details.
  It is wrong to claim, that, when doing phone
  calls, phone numbers must be transmitted. The author
  seems to take only the currently practiced ISDN protocols
  into consideration and ignored that, e.g. in particular
  for Packet Switched Networking with Public Key Addressing,
  as researched by Donald Davies as the original fundament 
  for the introduction of Packet Switched Networks, especially 
  this problem was to be bypassed/avoided."
  

He must obviously have confused something. It is commonly
known that the old analog phones had a dial as well. 
Public Key Cryptography (since he is talking in context of
cryptography, I presume that "Public Key Addressing" is
supposed to mean anything with Public Key Cryptography)
was invented in the seventies, while Packet Switched
Networks were developed in the sixties. Until now, 
I couldn't find any hint what Donald Davies could have
done which could be called Public Key Adressing.

The professor himself refuses any statement.

Does anybody have any idea, even an absurd one, what could
the professor have driven to this conclusion and what he
could have meant with Public Key Addressing?


regards
Hadmut




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