Ecash and Digital Credentials.

[swestrup]

Stefan Brand's book Rethinking Public Key Infrastructures and Digital Certificates: Building in Privacy is now available free from his ecash website. I'm not sure if its worth reading or not. I thought that some of his earlier ecash work made for good reading, while some seemed to be headed off in irrelevant directions. Had the released the book in a convenient form, I may well have downloaded the whole thing to read some day when I was bored. Since its in chunks though, I don't know if I'll bother. If anyone has a review of the work, let me know, so I can figure out if its worth the time.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

Good Lord, man.

First, technically, it is the work on digital certificates. I mean, yes, if you're narrowly interested in ecash I suppose it is an 'irrelevant direction' to devise digital certificates that can respond under encryption and without leaking to arbitrary boolean queries over a structure - but for general computation, general techniques are in order.

Second, it is not what I'd call an easy read. I have BH's copy, and after two attempts I still haven't finished it.

Third, it really worries me IP-wise: reading the book, the man may have some very dangerous patents in terms of controlling the directions of progress in distributed O/S.

You do want to grab a copy, though.

[swestrup]

Not what I meant. Some of his ecash stuff was simply unworkable. If his digital certificates were similar, I wanted to avoid it. Since you say its got real meat, I'll try reading it.

[sps.livejournal.com]

Hm. Well, if it's unworkable, I'd like to know (and I'd like to know why). I thought it looked pretty solid.

What was wrong with the ecash?

[swestrup]

IIRC, one of the papers required a central trusted server, secure hardware dongles for every user, AND couldn't do micropayments. It just didn't look like a useful section of the parameter space to explore...

[sps.livejournal.com]

?! Assuming a central trusted server and secure dongles, I'm not sure there's much you can't do. What properties was he trying to buy you with this?

[swestrup]

I don't remember. I just made a mental note that not all of Stefan Brand's work is up to snuff and went on. Hence my asking for a review of his latest work.