Public key as Identities in real world

Public key as Identities in real world(medium.com)

1 points by nivesh2 8 years ago | 4 comments

What happens if you need to repudiate a particular public-key? If the Public Key is tied to your identity then you have a real problem.

Your identity is one thing, you ability to authenticate is another, your ability to encrypt is another still. Experience in other fields tells us that conflating different things and purposes into a single thing is generally a very bad move.

nivesh2 8 years ago | |

well, the public is not tied to ones identity. It is just a theoretical concept that public key acts as an actor. Besides, the thing what you are talking about is related to anonymity which is a different concept.

ColinWright 8 years ago | | |

> well, the public is not tied to ones identity.

And yet your title is "Public key as Identities"

> It is just a theoretical concept that public key acts as an actor.

And yet you are talking specifically about using a Public Key in practice.

> ... the thing what you are talking about is related to anonymity which is a different concept.

None of what I've said is related to anonymity.

Your title is "Public key as Identities", which oddly enough leads me to believe that you are talking about using a public key as an identity. But if you do that, then your identity is the public key, because that's what you've just set up.

But keys get compromised, and so it is occasionally critical to be able to repudiate a key. But if it's your identity, you can't do that.

In short, everything in that article seems to be vague speculation without addressing some very real problems with the concept it's espousing.

nivesh2 8 years ago |

If you know private key that corresponds to a public key. Then you can sign messages using private key and publish it onto the network, but what you are basically doing is making statements on behalf of that public key.