[2536] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
RE: Reply to "ABA" becomes root CA for financial services industry
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dwight Arthur)
Tue Apr 21 14:07:21 1998
From: "Dwight Arthur" <dwightarthur@mindspring.com>
To: "Rick Smith" <rick_smith@securecomputing.com>,
"Kawika Daguio" <Kdaguio@aba.com>, <dcsb@ai.mit.edu>,
<cryptography@c2.net>, <dbs@philodox.com>
Cc: <alivings@aba.com>, <jbyrne@aba.com>, <tgreco@aba.com>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 16:48:38 -0400
In-Reply-To: <v03007800b1528b896de2@[172.17.1.150]>
Wow, is it officially Spam when I reply to all these lists at once?
Rick Smith wrote "The central point of my own skepticism about PKI projects
is that I believe they should be implemented from the ground up. The lowest
level certification authorities need to be put in place first. The
transactions relying on these CAs must be thoroughly exercised and the host
enterprise must grapple with loss, error, and fraud on a private level. Only
then can private enterprises make informed decisions about the true business
meaning of cross certification. Most PKI systems I've seen focus on the
upper levels, trying to make them profitable and lawsuit-resistant. This
doesn't help the users, so it doesn't really promote public key usage."
Rick, do you know the ABA effort to be devoid of bottom-up drivers? Most
major banks and brokerage firms in my experience are at least planning for
how they will issue and/or use certificates, and in a number of cases they
are in the second year of pilot or rollout. There are some efforts, such as
the NACHA/IC CA Interoperability Pilot, where banks have driven over the
line into how they will exchange certificates with each other. This is
defined as a "rootless" pilot but as the banks worked out the logistics of a
five-way key exchange it turned out that a single directory source is
valuable. ABA's not in this pilot but some people in the pilot are also
working with ABA. This feels bottom up to me.
--------------------------------------------------
p:(212) 412-8687 Dwight Arthur
f:(212) 908-2345 Managing Director: Systems
b:(917) 646-6682 National Securities Clearing
dwightarthur@mindspring.com 55 Water Street
http://www.nscc.com New York, NY 10041-0082
