Re: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
James A. Donald writes: Further, genuinely secure systems are now becoming available, notably Symbian. What does it mean for Symbian to be genuinely secure? How was this determined and achieved? -- http://www.eff.org/about/staff/#chris_palmer signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
Chris Palmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: James A. Donald writes: Further, genuinely secure systems are now becoming available, notably Symbian. What does it mean for Symbian to be genuinely secure? How was this determined and achieved? By executive fiat. Peter.
Re: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
James A. Donald writes: Further, genuinely secure systems are now becoming available, notably Symbian. Chris Palmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] What does it mean for Symbian to be genuinely secure? How was this determined and achieved? There is no official definition of genuinely secure, and it is my judgment that Symbian is unlikely to suffer the worm, virus and trojan problems to the extent that has plagued other systems.
Re: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
hi ( 05.10.26 09:17 -0700 ) James A. Donald: While many people are rightly concerned that DRM will ultimately mean that the big corporation, and thus the state, has root access to their computers and the owner does not, it also means that trojans, viruses, and malware does not. do you really think this is true? doesn't microsoft windows prove that remote control of computers only leads to compromise? [especially in our heavily networked world] and doesn't history show that big corporations are only interested in revenue- so that if they get revenue by forcing you to pay them fees for 'upkeep' of your digital credentials to keep your computer working they are going to do that. the problems 'solved' by DRM can also be solved by moving to an operating system where you have control of it, instead of an operating system filled with hooks so other people can control your computer. and that operating system is freely available ... -- \js oblique strategy: don't be frightened of cliches
Re: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
At 10:22 AM -0500 10/31/05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: and doesn't history show that big corporations are only interested in revenue One should hope so. ;-) Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
From: R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Oct 25, 2005 8:34 AM To: cryptography@metzdowd.com, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand .. That is to say, your analysis conflicts with the whole trend towards T-0 trading, execution, clearing and settlement in the capital markets, and, frankly, with all payment in general as it gets increasingly granular and automated in nature. The faster you can trade or transact business with the surety that the asset in question is now irrevocably yours, the more trades and transactions you can do, which benefits not only the individual trader but markets as a whole. The prerequisite for all this is that when the asset changes hands, it's very nearly certain that this was the intention of the asset's previous owner. My point isn't to express my love for book-entry payment systems. There's plenty to hate about them. But if the alternative is an anonymous, irreversible payment system whose control lies in software running alongside three pieces of spyware on my Windows box, they probably still win for most people. Even bad payment systems are better than ones that let you have everything in your wallet stolen by a single attack. .. However anonymous irrevocability might offend one's senses and cause one to imagine the imminent heat-death of the financial universe (see Gibbon, below... :-)), I think that technology will instead step up to the challenge and become more secure as a result. What's with the heat-death nonsense? Physical bearer instruments imply stout locks and vaults and alarm systems and armed guards and all the rest, all the way down to infrastructure like police forces and armies (private or public) to avoid having the biggest gang end up owning all the gold. Electronic bearer instruments imply the same kinds of things, and the infrastructure for that isn't in place. It's like telling people to store their net worth in their homes, in gold. That can work, but you probably can't leave the cheapest lock sold at Home Depot on your front door and stick the gold coins in the same drawer where you used to keep your checkbook. And, since internet bearer transactions are, by their very design, more secure on public networks than book-entry transactions are in encrypted tunnels on private networks, they could even be said to be secure *in spite* of the fact that they're anonymous; that -- as it ever was in cryptography -- business can be transacted between two parties even though they don't know, or trust, each other. Why do you say internet bearer transactions are more secure? I can see more efficient, but why more secure? It looks to me like both kinds of payment system are susceptible to the same broad classes of attacks (bank misbehavior (for a short time), someone finding a software bug, someone breaking a crypto algorithm or protocol). What makes one more secure than the other? .. Cheers, RAH --John Kelsey
Re: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
-- John Kelsey What's with the heat-death nonsense? Physical bearer instruments imply stout locks and vaults and alarm systems and armed guards and all the rest, all the way down to infrastructure like police forces and armies (private or public) to avoid having the biggest gang end up owning all the gold. Electronic bearer instruments imply the same kinds of things, and the infrastructure for that isn't in place. It's like telling people to store their net worth in their homes, in gold. That can work, but you probably can't leave the cheapest lock sold at Home Depot on your front door and stick the gold coins in the same drawer where you used to keep your checkbook. Some of us get spyware more than others. Further, genuinely secure systems are now becoming available, notably Symbian. While many people are rightly concerned that DRM will ultimately mean that the big corporation, and thus the state, has root access to their computers and the owner does not, it also means that trojans, viruses, and malware does not. DRM enables secure signing of transactions, and secure storage of blinded valuable secrets, since DRM binds the data to the software, and provides a secure channel to the user. So secrets representing ID, and secrets representing value, can only be manipulated by the software that is supposed to be manipulating it. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 3CepcQ59MYKAZTizEycP1vkZBbexwbyiobaC/bXS 44hfxMF4PBKXmc5uavnegOFFCMtNwDmpIMxLBcyI3
On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- At 3:57 PM -0400 10/24/05, John Kelsey wrote: More to the point, an irreversible payment system raises big practical problems in a world full of very hard-to-secure PCs running the relevant software. One exploitable software bug, properly used, can steal an enormous amount of money in an irreversible way. And if your goal is to sow chaos, you don't even need to put most of the stolen money in your own account--just randomly move it around in irreversible, untraceable ways, making sure that your accounts are among the ones that benefit from the random generosity of the attack. The payment system operators will surely be sued for this, because they're the only ones who will be reachable. They will go broke, and the users will be out their money, and nobody will be silly enough to make their mistake again. Though I agree with the notion that anonymity is orthogonal to market demand at the moment, I think you lost me at the word account, above. :-). That is to say, your analysis conflicts with the whole trend towards T-0 trading, execution, clearing and settlement in the capital markets, and, frankly, with all payment in general as it gets increasingly granular and automated in nature. The faster you can trade or transact business with the surety that the asset in question is now irrevocably yours, the more trades and transactions you can do, which benefits not only the individual trader but markets as a whole. The whole foundation of modern finance, and several -- almost posthumous, so pervasive was the homeopathic socialism that we now call Keynesianism -- Nobel prizes in economics are based on that premise, and it has been proven empirically now for many decades: The entire history of the currency futures markets would be a good example, though now that I think of it, any derivative market, since the time of Thales himself, would prove the point. However anonymous irrevocability might offend one's senses and cause one to imagine the imminent heat-death of the financial universe (see Gibbon, below... :-)), I think that technology will instead step up to the challenge and become more secure as a result. And, since internet bearer transactions are, by their very design, more secure on public networks than book-entry transactions are in encrypted tunnels on private networks, they could even be said to be secure *in spite* of the fact that they're anonymous; that -- as it ever was in cryptography -- business can be transacted between two parties even though they don't know, or trust, each other. For instance, another problem with internet bearer transactions, besides their prima facie anonymity (they're only prima facie because, while the protocols don't *require* is-a-person and-then-you-go-to-jail identity, traffic analysis is still quite trivial for the time being, onion routers notwithstanding) is that the client is responsible not only for most of the computation, but also for the storage of notes or coins, instead of a central database in a clearinghouse or bank somewhere storing various offsetting book-entries in, as you noted above, accounts. :-). Of course, simply backing up one's data off-site, much easier with internet bearer certificates than with whole databases, solves this problem, and, as we all know here, the safest way to do *that* is to use some kind of m-of-n hash, stored, someday, for even smaller bits of cash :-), in many places on the net at once. Obviously, we don't need small cash to store big assets, any more than we need big servers to distribute big files in BitTorrent, but it will only accelerate, if not complete, the process, when we get there. As I have said, too many times :-), about these things, transaction cost is always going to be the critical factor in any change from book-entries to chaumian-esque internet bearer transactions. And I believe that, hand-in-hand with increased security, reduced transaction cost is more a function of the collapsing cost and the ubiquity of distributed processing power and network access than anything else. So, anonymity is, in fact, orthogonal to market demand, primarily because it's an *effect*, and not a cause, of that demand. As we all do now with the current proctological state of book-entry finance, the anonymity of a proposed internet bearer transaction infrastructure will just be a cost that the market would have to bear. :-). To channel Schopenhauer a bit, like the emergence of industrialism and the abolition of slavery was before it, once anonymity becomes a feature of our transaction infrastructure, people will eventually declare it to be not only self-evident all along, but a moral *prerequisite* of any transaction as well. To put it another way, it's a pity for acrophobics that the fastest way to get anywhere these days is to fly, but it is still a physical fact, nonetheless. Cheers, RAH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP Desktop 9.0.2 (Build 2425)
