An e-mail address is unique (accepting that some e-mail addresses go to multiple people, and others are attached to a job/position rathe than a person). It's certainly easy for me to get an e-mail address that I and no one else use.
It's also a precise sequence of ASCII characters, which means that it's easy to match (as opposed to, say, biometrics, which may vary).
It's true that I don't know that your e-mail address is you, but that's not the problem talked about. The 'John Wilson' problem is more or less solved, because not only will all John Wilsons have different e-mail addresses, but I've got at least a fighting chance of knowing whether I've got the right one based on the e-mail address.
At the very least, in the e-mail address I have an unambiguous key with which to search other sources of information that may be useful in identifying and verifying the person.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: "PKI needs more than a name"
Date: 2002-06-11 04:34 am (UTC)Yes, I think.
An e-mail address is unique (accepting that some e-mail addresses go to multiple people, and others are attached to a job/position rathe than a person). It's certainly easy for me to get an e-mail address that I and no one else use.
It's also a precise sequence of ASCII characters, which means that it's easy to match (as opposed to, say, biometrics, which may vary).
It's true that I don't know that your e-mail address is you, but that's not the problem talked about. The 'John Wilson' problem is more or less solved, because not only will all John Wilsons have different e-mail addresses, but I've got at least a fighting chance of knowing whether I've got the right one based on the e-mail address.
At the very least, in the e-mail address I have an unambiguous key with which to search other sources of information that may be useful in identifying and verifying the person.