Re: I trust Adam

I Find Karma (adam@cs.caltech.edu)
Thu, 19 Jun 97 16:24:44 PDT


> This may be a dangerous axiom, but I trust Adam:
> http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/LOCAL/trust.html

For the linking-impaired, this is our request for comments on the Web of
Trust paper we've been writing for the last five years...

The abstract:

> To date, "World Wide Web Security" has been publicly associated with
> debates over cryptographic technology, protocols, and public policy.
> This narrow focus can obscure the wider challenge of building trusted
> Web applications. Since the Web aims to be an information space that
> reflects not just human knowledge but also human relationships, it will
> soon reflect the full complexity of trust relationships among people,
> computers, and organizations. Within the computer security community,
> Trust Management has emerged as a new philosophy for protecting open,
> decentralized systems, in contrast to traditional tools for securing
> closed systems. Trust Management is an essential approach, because the
> Web crosses many trust boundaries that old-school computer security
> cannot even begin to handle.
>
> In this paper, we consider how this philosophy could be applied to the
> Web. We introduce the fundamental principles, principals, and policies
> of Trust Management, as well as Web-specific pragmatic issues. In so
> doing, we develop a taxonomy for how trust assertions can be specified,
> justified, and validated. We demonstrate the value of this framework by
> considering the trust questions faced by the designers of applications
> for secure document distribution, content filtering, electronic
> commerce, and downloadable-code systems. We conclude by sketching the
> limits to automatable Trust Management, demonstrating how trust on the
> Web will adapt to the trust rules of human communities and vice versa.

Constructive comments are, as always, welcome. Nasty profanity will, as
always, be ignored.

> Thanks, buddy!

No, Rohit, thank *you*. You da man on this one. I'm just a monkey.

By the way, please don't show this paper to Bob Cringely until after he
pays you for the last one... :)

----
adam@cs.caltech.edu

You two need to work on trust. Only then will there be a free exchange
of sex and discounts.
-- Jerry Seinfeld on "Seinfeld"