Keynote Address

Abstract

Well good morning. When I saw the ostensible title of this workshop I asked Bruce what it meant, because it didn’t convey anything to me whatsoever. I gather that what it really means is, when some protocol occurs, finding out all of the agencies that have any influence whatever over what happens. Now this is a tall order because if influencing what happens includes being an attacker, it includes, in a general way, everyone. So maybe one should say that the art of designing these protocols is to ensure that attackers don’t influence what happens. You can’t achieve that either, because influencing what happens includes causing retries by deleting messages. I would suggest that in some interpretation of what Bruce has said, the participants in the protocol are everybody, end of story, close workshop, but this is perhaps not quite what he meant. He means things like trusted third parties or semi-trusted third parties, but as soon as you get on to the people who provide the communication then this seems to be getting a bit dubious. The whole point of being a communications provider is that you shouldn’t be a participant, you should be indiscernible.