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- From: karn@servo.qualcomm.com (Phil Karn)
- Subject: Re: Anti-spoofing protocol?
- Message-ID: <1993Jan5.031805.26623@qualcomm.com>
- Sender: news@qualcomm.com
- Nntp-Posting-Host: servo.qualcomm.com
- Organization: Qualcomm, Inc
- References: <1993Jan4.104051.23477@qualcomm.com> <1993Jan4.215027.17258@netcom.com>
- Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 03:18:05 GMT
- Lines: 15
-
- In article <1993Jan4.215027.17258@netcom.com> rcain@netcom.com (Robert Cain) writes:
- >This all assumes that you have a secure means of getting your public key
- >to the other or an authenticated one. Both seem equivalent in the end
- >to swapping a secret key to me. This makes me question the fundamentals
- >of PK actually.
-
- Why do you say that? An authenticated channel is much easier to get
- than an authenticated and secret channel. I can get pretty good
- authentication right now by calling up somebody on the phone whose
- voice I know well and exchanging MD5 hashes of whatever information we
- want to authenticate (e.g., a public key). I could care less if
- somebody eavesdrops this call, but I certainly *would* care if we were
- exchanging secret DES keys instead.
-
- Phil
-