Re: Identity (was PKI International Consortium)

[Ed Gerck <[e-mail]>]

Eric Norman wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 4 Apr 2004 [e-mail] wrote:
> 
> > So, again, in the design of Identity Certificates we should concentrate on
> > Identity issues, and on the needs of systems requiring identification. Trying
> > to use Identity Certificates for other uses is wrong.
> 
> Well, my opinion is that you won't have much luck dealing with "Identity
> issues" until you have a good definition of "identity".
> 
> Here's my shot at it.  If you start from the premise that identity is
> just a set of attributes, then your identity is those attributes that
> are constant and last forever.

Not even your fingerprints are constant and last forever (or, for your 
lifetime).

Identity is not a thing or a set of things. Identity is the connection
-- to identify is to seek connections [1]. In identification we look for 
logical or natural connections, where absence of connections also counts. 
For example:

- between a fingerprint and the person that has it,
- between a PK certificate and its private key,
- between a name and the person that answers by that name,
- between an Internet host and a URL that connects to it,
- between an idea and the way we can represent it in words,
- conversely, between words and the ideas they represent,
- etc.

Identification can thus be understood not only in the sense of an
"identity" connection, but in the wider sense of any connection.

That's why it does not make much sense to have *one* identity certificate
-- we do have many identities (connections) and we may need to use them 
in separate. Which one to use is just a matter of protocol expression, 
need, cost and (very importantly) privacy concerns [1]. 

Cheers,
Ed Gerck

[1] For my '98 draft on this concept, please see 
http://nma.com/mcg-mirror/coherence.txt
This work shows that not identity but coherence (as natural or logical
connections) is the general metric for identification. More coherence 
and more coherence modes mean stronger identification, even if anonymous.