[ih] email at scale

[johnl at iecc.com (John Levine)]

>Or... start with credit cards.  You generally have to establish identity 
>to get a bank account and/or credit card.  That's a pretty good start 
>when obtaining a crypto cert.

Do you have any idea how much stolen credit card information is in
circulation these days?  It's reported to be a double digit percentage
of all card info.

It's the usual tradeoff.  A system that requires appearing in person
at a notary to get your application stamped is indeed pretty secure,
but is also sufficiently inconvenient that it's unlikely to get much
use.  I mean, really, you can get a free S/MIME cert by visiting a web
site and clicking a link on an e-mail, and how many people even bother
to do that?

R's,
John