[Cryptography] keys, signatures, trust, identification, badges, et cetera

[Michael Kjörling]

On 12 Sep 2014 10:20 -0700, from iang at iang.org (ianG):
> I think there is some merit in confusing the formal channels of
> identification.  If I meet some dude at a hacker event, I'm more
> interested in who he is than that he has some document from some
> overbearing state that tries to compress his personality into a 9 digit
> string.

In all honesty though, isn't that approximately the same thing as
trying to talk about the concept of a key belonging to a person, and
using the key fingerprint to validate that you have the right key?

In both instances we have a person, we have something _about_ that
person (a public key, a name, an email address, an employment
relationship, ...), and we want to validate that the two match by
using a third thing (a photo ID, a key fingerprint, a business card,
...).

Not saying it's the same thing, but it appears to me to be _rather
closely related_ when you remove the layers of technology and just
look at the problem being solved in the abstract.

By the way, Swedish official ID numbers (similar to US SSNs, but not
quite) are ten digits long. Twelve if you use the full form, which
often is only used for storage (the first two or four digits is the
year of birth, with or without the century; until the early 00s, it
was common to specify only the last two digits of the year, but using
the full year has caught on in many uses since then). They started out
one digit shorter, and then a check digit was added once computerized
databases became more common.

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
OpenPGP B501AC6429EF4514 https://michael.kjorling.se/public-keys/pgp
                 “People who think they know everything really annoy
                 those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)