[liberationtech] dark mail alliance

[Ben Laurie]

On 1 November 2013 22:47, Tony Arcieri <bascule at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 2:00 PM, Maxim Kammerer <mk at dee.su> wrote:
>>
>> But since you are asking, safe human-readable addresses are not possible
>> as a concept, unless
>> you are willing to trust a third party.
>
>
> Aaron Swartz wrote a great blog post about "Squaring Zooko's Triangle", an
> idea which has more or less been implemented in terms of Namecoin:
>
> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko
>
> tl;dr: a Bitcoin-like global append-only log can enable the secure mapping
> of human-meaningful names to cryptographic keys

I'm sorry to bang on about it, but, if you want an append-only log,
there are ways to implement it that are both far more efficient than
Bitcoin _and_ are truly append-only (Bitcoin is only kinda
append-only, until someone comes along with a longer, different
"append-only" log). For example, the one we use for Certificate
Transparency.

But really, what you want for mappings of names to keys is a
verifiable map, not an append-only log. An append-only log requires
everyone to download the whole log. A verifiable map does not.

We describe two ways to make verifiable maps here:
http://www.links.org/files/RevocationTransparency.pdf (described in
the context of revocation, but it is obvious how you'd extend it to
any mapping).

I was hoping to get CT finished before I started to figure out how to
implement verifiable maps, but I guess I should perhaps get on with
it.