Maybe It's Snake Oil All the Way Down

James A. Donald jamesd at echeque.com
Wed Jun 4 19:25:28 EDT 2003


    --
Everyone in America has several shared secrets identifying them 
-- the number of the beast to identify them to the state, and 
their credit card numbers identifying them to various financial 
institutions, plus a hundred passwords to  login to their
email, their bank, their network provider, e-gold, etc.

The PKI idea was that we would instead use PK in place of 
shared secrets, but if an ordinary person had a private key, 
what could he use it for?

The spam that seeks to get us to login to e-g0ld and the 
BankOf4merica.com works because the logins are based on shared 
secrets, not private keys, and the networks are setup to rely 
on shared secrets because there is no practical alternative. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     r9lUivpSt7tWiPOxVr17a9sjkgXnnbC5matqsa6/
     4UovWiFVbzH8bFEhVsekeydmrrDmez+5/B/3ZSo4B




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