[47412] in Cypherpunks
"trust management" vs. "certified identity"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Norman Hardy)
Wed Jan 17 14:34:15 1996
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 09:58:46 -0800
To: mab@research.att.com
From: norm@netcom.com (Norman Hardy)
Cc: fod@brd.ie, cypherpunks@toad.com
This is reminiscent of a recent idea of mine. Imagine the following signed
declaration:
I (fingerprint = ...) claim that the code X with SH (secure hash) = ...
satisfies contract with SH= ... when its free code pointers are bound to
other code conforming to contracts identified within X by their SH's.
The contracts would be either formal or informal.
When a Java program arrives at a client it can warrant its services if it
finds local access to warranted sub-routines. (For this purpose behaviors
of objects are sub-routines.)
The Java loader can build warrants recursively with such declarations. They
would, of course, be relative to the reputation of signers of the above
declarations.
I have just sent for your paper.
