Naming via SDSI

hal@finney.org hal@finney.org
Wed, 7 Mar 2001 10:01:32 -0800


Lucas Gonze, <lucas@worldos.com>, writes:
> To get human-friendly IDs, it is not hard to have a namespace provider map names
> to hashes.
>
> IMHO unless the UN runs ICANN there is no solution to the political problem.
> Always allow the user to specify a namespace (either implicitly or explicitly)
> and the problem goes away.

But now the problem is, how to securely identify a namespace provider,
when you supply someone with a URL?  Isn't this the same problem?

You need either a friendly (user-readable) name for the namespace
provider, in which case more than one entity could claim to have that
name, or you need a cryptographically secure name, which will be long.

Hal