🚀 go-pugleaf

dla@iso (Don Alvarez) writes,
> The problem has NOTHING to do with encryption.  No matter how you
> encrypt/sign/etc your message, we are still faced with the fact that
> you and I have never met and know nothing about each other.

Ahhhhhh.  I wish you'd said that in the first place.   :-(

You're right, there's a fundamental problem of how to establish the
necessary trust that at least SOME FRACTION of the other people
participating in the network are honest.  The amount of trust that you
place in the secure newsgroup should be exactly proportional to your
trust in the majority of its participants.

For most electronic stuff on the internet, a reasonable solution is
"trust by reputation."  If a large number of respectable "net citizens"
are members, then you're in good shape.

Another method is to make sure that each participant corresponds to a
real person or organization, by making sure that a few of the current
members physically meet, or at least talk on the telephone, with every
prospective new member.  There should also be limits on how quickly the
membership may change.  This prevents "flooding" the membership with
bogus entries, and makes cheating coalitions harder to form.

---

If you're unsatisfied with this, then please consider my proposal to be
a thought-experiment, which begins with the premise,

  "Assume you have the public keys of N people, and are willing to
   trust that no more than 10% of them will form a cheating coalition.
   Implement a secure newsgroup."

I think this is an interesting premise, and I would hope that most 
of our ensuing discussion will be willing to take it for granted.
Discussion about the premise is also OK with me, though.


M.