Re: Man in the Middle Revisited (but not for the last time)

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

I suspect I'm not the only one getting weary of going around and around on
this issue, so I'll confine my response to just one point:

At 3:37 AM 10/11/95, Bryce wrote:

>> Who any of these entities "really" are is irrelevant to me. (I don't even
>> know if Hal Finney, who I met once a few years ago, is the "real" Hal
>> Finney, nor do I really care.)
>
>
>Well and good, Tim, but you *do* care if the entity calling itself "Hal
>Finney" is being surrounded by the Man in the Channel ("Mitch") and all
>of your communications with that entity are under Mitch's control.  For
>example, you may choose to enter a contract with the entity calling
>itself "Hal Finney", and provide some sort of consulting service to it
>in exchange for 10,000 cyberbucks.  If Mitch is actually in control
>then he could easily steal both the output of your consultation *and*
>Hal's 10,000 cyberbucks and leave the two of you hating each other.

Nope. au contraire, negatory. I *do not* care if the entity calling itself
"Hal Finney" is being surrounded by an MITM. Only "Hal Finney the Key" can
read messages I encrypt to the public key I got from him long ago, so if
the "Hal + MITM" can do so, they are effectively one and the same.

(Not really, in some other senses, but far beyond anything simple crypto
can handle.)

--Tim May

Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
Corralitos, CA              | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839      | black markets, collapse of governments.
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