About the Talk:
Private sector cryptography has been suppressed by the US Government for decades. A little-used exclusion from that suppression, since 1989, has been the use of crypto for authentication. But much of what we need, to build cryptographic infrastructure, involves only authentication rather than privacy.
I am working on changing the Internet Domain Name System to provide strong cryptographic authentication of its information. This will prevent some kinds of "spoofing" by miscreants. More importantly, it will provide a globally accessible, distributed, replicated, high availability, high speed, locally published database for publishing cryptographic keys, indexed by email addresses and domain names.
In late December I took early step in that process: I published source code for an enhanced Domain Name System, including full source code for the RSA crypto algorithm, on the Internet, from the United States. Other US-based freeware crypto developers can release similar authentication-only crypto source code.
About the Speaker:
John Gilmore is an entrepreneur and civil libertarian. He was an early employee of Sun Microsystems, and co-founded Cygnus Support, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks, and the Internet's "alt" newsgroups. He has twenty-five years of experience in the computer industry, including programming, hardware and software design, and management. He is a significant contributor to the worldwide free software development effort. His advocacy efforts on encryption policy aim to improve public understanding of this fundamental technology for privacy and accountability in open societies. He is currently a board member of the Internet Society and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Contact Information:
John Gilmore, gnu@toad.com
John Gilmore's home page
My DNS Security page