In this situation, Charlie has to trust Bravo at least to identify the
right Alpha (Bravo will do something like send a public key to Charlie and
say, "this is Alpha's (temporary, anonymous) public key"). Bravo could
say that anyone is Alpha, so if Charlie does not trust Bravo to produce
the correct Alpha, the situation breaks down. However, if Charlie _does_
trust Bravo this much, then Charlie might as well just send his responses
to Bravo in plaintext and say "please forward these to Alpha without
reading them". Any cryptography used is subject to a perfect
man-in-the-middle attack by Bravo, so it doesn't buy you anything.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:03:55 MDT