Can we copy trust?
Ben Laurie
ben at links.org
Mon Jun 2 14:57:29 EDT 2008
Ed Gerck wrote:
> In the essay "Better Than Free", Kevin Kelly debates which concepts hold
> value online, and how to monetize those values. See
> www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php
>
> Kelly's point can be very useful: *When copies are free, you need to
> sell things which can not be copied.*
>
> The problem that I see and present to this list is when he discusses
> qualities that can't be copied and considers "trust" as something that
> cannot be copied.
>
> Well, in the digital economy we had to learn how to copy trust and we
> did. For example, SSL would not work if trust could not be copied.
>
> How do we copy trust? By recognizing that because trust cannot be
> communicated by self-assertions (*), trust cannot be copied by
> self-assertions either.
>
> To trust something, you need to receive information from sources OTHER
> than the source you want to trust, and from as many other sources as
> necessary according to the extent of the trust you want. With more trust
> extent, you are more likely to need more independent sources of
> verification.
>
> To copy trust, all you do is copy the information from those channels in
> a verifiable way and add that to the original channel information. We do
> this all the time in scientific work: we provide our findings, we
> provide the way to reproduce the findings, and we provide the published
> references that anyone can verify.
>
> To copy trust in the digital economy, we provide digital signatures
> from one or more third-parties that most people will trust.
>
> This is how SSL works. The site provides a digital certificate signed by
> a CA that most browsers trust, providing an independent channel to
> verify that the web address is correct -- in addition to what the
> browser's location line says.
But doesn't that prove the point? The trust that you consequently place
in the web server because of the certificate _cannot_ be copied to
another webserver. That other webserver has to go out and buy its own
copy, with its own domain name it it.
Cheers,
Ben.
--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.links.org/
"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com
More information about the cryptography
mailing list