[8295] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: User authentication
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Martin Hamilton)
Mon May 29 07:03:13 1995
Date: Mon, 29 May 1995 06:43:19 +0500
Errors-To: procmaster@www19.w3.org
Reply-To: martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk
From: Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www10.w3.org>
Kee Hinckley writes:
| I'm confused. Are you advocating a central registry of all browser owners,
| where the browser checks that registry, asks me to match the password, and
| then lets me send mail? I think a public key system would be simpler,
| safer and more private.
Only centralised in a local sense :-)
e.g. students in a public access lab being required to supply a valid
user name and password to a local "authentication server" before the
browser will allow them to send mail or post news. The authenticated
user name would be stamped on any messages they sent, say as an X-
header
At the moment it's ridiculously easy for casual WWW users to forge
messages. This is just a quick hack which would make it a bit more
difficult. Perhaps too difficult for the majority. Sure, public key
would be nice too, but more effort is involved!
Martin
