[cap-talk] "Who" seen as thorny (was: Defense of Identities, etc.)

[Jed Donnelley]

At 08:35 PM 12/9/2006, Karp, Alan H wrote:
>Jed wrote:
> >
> > Is there more to this "who" (identity) issue that I'm
> > missing.  It seems
> > to me that private keys can work on a network.  Is the issue you're
> > focusing on defining "who" in a pure capability sense?  Or perhaps
> > you're still considering the binding of an identity (e.g. a
> > private key)
> > to something more meaningful like a person or some sort of trust
> > relation.  I believe this later is well understood and not
> > particularly challenging, except perhaps conceptually.
>
>I'm using "who" as someone or something to assign responsibility to.
>One complicating factor is that one party (user, process, whatever) can
>have more than one identity, e.g., private key, and one identity, e.g.
>private key, can be shared by many parties.

The only thing we have available for consideration is the identity.
I feel this is again like the case of the extra terrestrial
communicators.  It doesn't matter to us in dealing with other
identities if the multiple identities we see are in fact part
of a single blob or if one identity is shared by many parties.
We likely can't even tell.

If we consider our own identity or identities of course it may
matter very much to us whether we share our identity or go
by multiple identities.  These sorts of acts may have an
effect on how much trust we can gain from others.

--Jed  http://www.webstart.com/jed-signature.html