On Tue, Mar 06, 2012 at 12:22:16PM -0500, Andrew Lewman wrote: > > At PETS in 2009[0], Paul did a talk on 'why I'm not an entropist' and > suggested that people need to start working on defeating a mythical > global passive adversary. Maybe in the near future some government will > have the capability of being the global passive adversary. >
Is that a typo? The suggestion was that people _stop_ working on defeating the GPA, which is unrealistic as both too strong (global) and too weak (passive). I've been making the same point for over 15 years, but this was an attempt to sum a lot of that up in one place. Adversaries may be really large, but it's generally unrealistic to consider any one of them truly global on the internet. (In the paper I call realistically large adversaries, The Man.) And passive makes your mathematical proofs cleaner (and sometimes doable at all) but assuming your adversary can't even make use of delaying packets passing by him for a few milliseconds is ridiculous. So you what you end up proving doesn't really tell you much about real systems even in principle. Which is why I (and others) have been working on better models. I'm a mere four years behind in putting my work up on the web, and this one wasn't co-authored so nobody else did either. I'll try to do something about that in my copious free time this week and send a link. aloha, Paul _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
