I was out for a while, so just catching up, and that sounds really, really cool.

One of my favorite things in sci-fi (and one that Cherryh does really well, BTW) is how changing technology changes culture and society. So your thesis is intriguing.

That one.

“Sure, I won’t understand it, but why not?”

Ok.

Oftentimes, in various settings (academia, financial institutions, health care, the power grid), we see individuals who don’t know each other needing to build a trust relationship. I need you to do something sensitive for me (release a patient record, tell me the status of some equipment, alter the state of some equipment, whatever), but you don’t know me.

What do we do?

Well, right now, either I ask you and you assume everything’s ok and do it — which is potentially very, very bad as things move more on-line and cyberterrorism becomes more prevalent — or, I leverage some personal relationships to get you to trust me. I call my college buddy who works with you, or my a lady I used to work with that works with your boss now or something like that. That’s how things work in the real world. Computer Scientists don’t normally deal well with things like that. It’s fuzzy. You can’t reason cleanly about it. You can’t describe it with stuff that looks like math and prove things about it.

I, however, find it extremely interesting. Who the hell cares if your system is elegant and provably correct if it prevents people from doing the things they do every day just to get their jobs done. It’s not “provably secure” if people have to turn it off just to do their work, is it?

So, what I’m doing is building a system that allows people to assert stuff about each other, and then bind those assertions to email they send. So, essentially, it allows people to vouch for each other in a verifiable way. I send a message to you and attach to it this credential from someone we both know. Perhaps it says we’re friends, or that we’re co-workers, or that I’m specifically allowed to ask you to do things A, B and C. Doesn’t matter. I send my message, I attach these extra statements, and your email client presents them to you and _you_ decide what the right thing to do is. It doesn’t tell you what to do, it doesn’t pop up a gajillion annoying dialogs…_you_ know what kinds of people you trust for certain things. I’m just building a system that will provide me with a way to give you extra information when you’re trying to decide whether to trust me or not.

I really like this kid. I hope he makes the team!

That scene was from Knocked Up. I laughed pretty hard during that scene - my wife couldn’t understand why it was so funny.