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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:11:01
Lewis McCarthy (lmccarth@cs.umass.edu)
Sun, 23 Aug 1998 17:22:00 -0400
Berke Durak writes:
> Problem Level I
>
> Two people meet on an anonymous chat network. They wish to know, without
> revealing information to the network, if they already know eachother, and if
> this is the case, they want to identity themselves.
>
> Naive/Trivial Solution I
>
> Establish a crypted link. Send identities. Authenticate using public keys or
> whatever.
>
> Problem Level II
>
> Two other people meet on the same network. They again wish to identify
> eachother, but no one wants to reveal his identity (i.e. his public key ID
> or whatever) to strangers.
It helps to recognize an existing level of indirection in the situation.
These identification problems only seem to be meaningful where each of the
"anonymous" parties adopts a cryptographic pseudonym for chatting on the
network. By `cryptographic pseudonym` I just mean that each person signs her
chat messages with a self-signed private/public key pair generated exclusively
for use on the anon chat net. That way the person creates a cryptographically
verifiable persona whose true identity one might wish to ascertain.
Now suppose each party also distributes a public encryption key, signed with
the pseudonym's signing key and generated expressly for use on the anon chat
net. Then that public encryption key can be used directly to communicate a
true identity, and a public key ID thereof, without revealing either to the
other chat participants.
-Lewis
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~lmccarth
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:11:01