[2734] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Secure Office
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ed Gerck)
Wed May 20 20:47:00 1998
Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 21:41:15 -0300 (EST)
From: Ed Gerck <egerck@laser.cps.softex.br>
To: cryptography@c2.net
On 15 May 1998, Marc Horowitz wrote:
>It's not that people outside the USA can't implement crypto. They
>can, and quite well. What they cannot do is get lots of people to use
>it. Eric, if you can compete effectively with Microsoft, I heartily
>encourage you to do so, and please don't stop at just making the
>crypto better.
>
>Another point of trivia: the PGP keyservers have fewer than 200,000
>keys on them. This is a lot, but it's a tiny fraction (1%?) of global
>internet users.
>
Marc:
Excellent point. I would add that cryto would also need to be
considered something *essential* to communications -- which it is NOT
nowadays. In that case, not even US law could ban it.
For example, Internet traffic scanning at major points in US-Europe
showed statistically that only 5% of the e-mail traffic is encrypted,
while about 90% of that is PGP. This happens because it is not
essential -- otherwise everyone would need to use it, like IP/DNS.
However, I wish to point out that I showed recently here that crypto
could be made truly essential to communications -- as a first example
of such a case -- if we consider semantic addressing.
Further, I provided full details of how such a system could work --
and I am sure that almost any developer could implement at least part
of it already with today's tools. It is not patented and will not be
-- it is simply copyrighted, requiring source and author citation.
A side benefit of semantic addressing is that non-unique and
ambiguous names and addresses, even keys, would not make a
difference. Updated summary version in
http://www.mcg.org.br/trustdef.htm#A.4.3
in an export-free site -- so anything that uses it is also
unemcumbered from that side.
Cheers,
Ed
______________________________________________________________________
Dr.rer.nat. E. Gerck egerck@novaware.cps.softex.br
http://novaware.cps.softex.br
--- Meta-Certificate Group member, http://www.mcg.org.br ---
