Re: New Method for Authenticated Public Key Exchange without Digital Certificates

From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler (lynn_at_garlic.com)
Date: 08/10/04 

Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2004 17:22:35 -0600

Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@t-online.de> writes:
> But would be trivial, wouldn't it? If I know (by some other
> means) that some 'real information' is authentic, then I
> don't need 'any' signature (whether digital or conventional),
> neither even PK itself. So what's your point? I don't yet
> understand, sorry.

maybe repeat for the 10th time ...

consumer goes to their bank and registers their public key.

the public key is stored in account record (this is even specified in
the definition for PKI CA registration authorities).

the bank issues them a relying-party-only certificate ....
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#rpo

even german banks started doing this in the mid-90s when it was
realized the privacy issues with an identity certificate. there was
presentation by somebody from one of the big german banks on the issue
at conference in 1998:
http://csrc.nist.gov/nissc/1998/index.html

the purpose of the certificate is for digitally signed communication
and digitally signed transactions with the consumer's bank. however,
we subsequently were doing some payload bloat studies about the
serious payload bloat of certifications on the standard payment
infrastructure. as part of the study on compressing certificates we
formulated the information theory that it was redundant and
superfluous for a bank customer to be repeatedly transmitting fields
in an relying-party-only certificate back to their financial
institution which involved fields that the their financial institution
already possessed. that was when we realized that all fields in a
relying-party-only certificate could be compressed from a
relying-party-only certificate resulting in the infinitly compressed
zero byte relying-party-only certificate.

if it makes you feel better ... we haven't gotten rid of the
certificates as being redundant and superfluous ... we have just
eliminated all redundant and superfluous fields in a
relying-party-only certificate, resulting in an infinitly compressed
zero byte relying-party-only certificates; and in fact we faithfully
attach zero byte relying-party-only certificates to all of our
communication with the relying-party ... the consumer's financial
institution.

we made the discovery of the astounding infinite compression technique
and the benefits of zero byte relying-party-only certificates when we
were investigating the server payload bloat the standard certificates
placed on the payment infrastructure with digitally signed payment
transactions.

we got the idea of the infinitly compressed zero-byte
relying-party-only compression from the relying-party-only certificate
presentation that was given at the referenced conference by member(s)
of the german banking community describing what they were doing with
relying-party-only certificates.

so I actually misspoke, we haven't gotten rid of redundant and
superfluous relying-party-only certificates ... we have just infinitly
compressed the relying-party-only certificates to zero bytes by
eliminating all fields that are redundant and superfluous. 

-- 
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
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