[fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: Marc Stiegler - An Introduction to Petname Systems

iang@iang.org iang@iang.org
Sun, 26 Jun 2005 19:44:49 +0100 (BST)


 Financial Cryptography Update: Marc Stiegler - An Introduction to Petname Systems 

                             June 26, 2005


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https://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000499.html



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Petnames evolved out of hard-won experience in the Electric Communities
project, and went on to become a staple within the capabilities school
of rights engineering.	But it wasn't until Bryce 'Zooko' Wilcox made
his dramatic claims of naming that petnames really discovered their
place in the financial cryptographer's armoury.

Petnames were previously undocumented in any formal sense and
disseminated by word of mouth and tantalising references such as Mark
Miller's Pet Names Markup Language.  Marc Stiegler, visiting researcher
at HP Labs, has now stepped up and collected the community knowledge
into one introductory piece, "An Introduction to Petname Systems."  He
has done us a grand service and deserves our thanks for putting
petnames onto an academically sound footing.

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Zooko's Triangle argues that names cannot be global, secure, and
memorable, all at the same time. Domain names are an example: they are
global, and memorable, but as the rapid rise of phishing demonstrates,
they are not secure.

Though no single name can have all three properties, the petname system
does indeed embody all three properties. Human beings have been using
petname systems since long before the advent of the computer. Informal
experiments with Petname-like systems in computer-oriented contexts
suggest that petnames are intuitive not only in the physical world but
also in the virtual world. Proposals already exist for simple
extensions to existing browsers that could alleviate (possibly
dramatically) the problems with phishing. As phishers gain
sophistication, it seems compelling to experiment with petname systems
as part of the solution.

http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/petnames/IntroPetNames.html
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We seek comments on the blog.  Petnames is a very important concept in
naming and if you design complicated financial cryptography systems it
will be well worth your while to be at least familiar with the
arguments within.

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