[tor-talk] Tor for everyone; introducing Eccentric Authentication

[me at beroal.in.ua]

On 25.02.16 01:26, Guido Witmond wrote:
> On 02/24/16 23:26, juan wrote:
>> On Wed, 24 Feb 2016 23:04:39 +0100
>> Guido Witmond <guido at witmond.nl> wrote:
>>
>>> My drive is to make key exchange happen as a natural part of normal
>>> interactions between people.
>> 	So teach people how to exchange keys.
> Teaching is not a solution. See Peter Gutmann's book Security
> Engineering. 800+ Pages of disasters with security. Depressing and
> enlightening ;-)
A magic wand is a solution. :-)

>>> Not as a separate step that could be
>>> neglected, forgotten or done wrong.
>> 	Ah you want key exchange without key exchange? That is, of
>> 	course, absurd.
> I don't want *people* to exchange keys. I envision people to exchange
> names and let computers do the key lookup.

> So the exchange of a human readable name - the id at site - implies that I
> can deduce the correct public key. The one-to-one relationship between
> names and keys makes it easy for humans to excahnge a name and for the
> computer to figure out the correct public key.
>
>
> So, to answer your question: people communicate id at site names, the
> computer verifies the uniqness properties to determine the corresponding
> public keys. The requirement to make the relation between names and
> public keys is key. Pun intended.
>
Though I don't understand your protocol, I don't like id at site names. 
That site belongs to a corporation, so I depend on a corporation which I 
can't control. There is a more fundamental problem with human readable 
names. There is competition for nice names like "sex" or "casino", for 
example, in the domain of domain names. This competition is resolved 
with auctions. So a human readable name is paid, and its owner depends 
on the registrar.Public key fingerprints are a solution to both problems.