This is a shameless violation of the official purpose of the meeting. I am seeking collaborators for my hobby horse. Please ignore it if you don't like it.
I would like to experiment with a
minimal infrastructure to support applications of public cryptographic keys. "Minimal" means that the infrastructure doesn't try to solve any particular problem for any particular use case. Rather, it tries to provide functions that appear to be required for
nearly all possible uses of public cryptographic keys, and that
need to be provided uniformly for full value.
I believe that such an infrastructure service may be supported by existing DNS software, with some scripts for automated anonymous unverified registration of domain names at some arbitrarily low level (no new top or 2d-level DNS registration is required). In particular, the service requires no administrative effort at all per key registration.
The basic idea is to distribute, quite promiscuously, [public-key, IP#] pairs in response to queries indexed by (hashes of) the public-keys. No trusted party will sign the pairs (they may be signed by the owner of the key in the pair, or that signature may be provided through communication with the IP#).
Here is some more information in some
papers in various states of disarray.
It appears that essentially every application of public cryptographic keys requires a simple, easy to find, distributor to link keys and addresses for communication. The raw (hashed) keys may already be useful as permanent non-mnemonic identifiers for agents whose IP#s may change over time. At the next level, they may be used to establish that a sequence of signed transactions involve the same agent, whose reputation may be established by her behavior in that sequence. At a higher level, other servers may provide more or less authoritative and reliable links between the public-key identifiers and other representations of identity, or qualifications on agents. These last services are likely to be expensive in human administration, and they can be reserved for transactions where they are really needed.
What I need:
- a co-author to help get the next paper out the door (a neurological problem prevents me from concentrating long enough to write it);
- a site willing and able to support a DNS server with scripts for the automatic anonymous unverified registration of keys.