[cap-talk] Is "Authority" Subjective?

[Pierre THIERRY]

Scribit David Wagner dies 24/06/2007 hora 10:04:
> For instance, one could argue that the ability to perform pure
> computation is itself an authority [...]. But for the most part, for
> the authority analyses we tend to do, this is usually not the kind of
> authority we usually care about.

We should keep in mind that there are some important cases where
authority to pure computation is important: it's the case fot two
mutually suspicious subjects A and B, where A wants to give B authority
to use A's secret algorithm but not authority to inspect it and B wants
to use this authority with the guarantee that A won't be able to inspect
the processed data. ISTR it was a scenario that KeyKOS specifically had
to make possible. And did.

In EROS or Coyotos, A would give B a capability to a constructor for a
process implementing the secret algorithm that B couldn't inspect after
creation. It's a capability to pure computation, but a secret
computation that the user running A couldn't add to it himself. This has
nothing to do with the side-effects of the algorithm. It could be purely
functional.

Purely,
Pierre
-- 
nowhere.man at levallois.eu.org
OpenPGP 0xD9D50D8A
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