Forwarded From: Robert Hettinga <rahat_private> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- The Digital Commerce Society of Boston Presents Dr. Ronald L. Rivest Cryptographer Underwriting Microcash on the Internet: Deep Crack = MicroMint? Tuesday, June 1st, 1999 12 - 2 PM The Downtown Harvard Club of Boston One Federal Street, Boston, MA MicroMint is a low security, high speed micropayment protocol based on k-way hash-function collisions. Just like an industrial mint, a MicroMint underwriter's economies of scale allow the production of large quantities of 'coins' at very low cost per coin, while small-scale forgery attempts can only produce coins at a cost exceeding their value. Unlike digital signature methods, a large initial investment is required to generate the first MicroMint coin, but generating additional coins is exponentially cheaper the more you produce. A true 'off-line' protocol, MicroMint produces a simple bit-string whose validity can be easily checked. The time to market for a possible MicroMint machine has been accelerated recently with the discovery that a MicroMint prototype has inadvertently been built already. "Deep Crack" is a custom-built DES-cracking machine built by Cryptography Research, Inc., for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Deep Crack" was built to prove that DES, the Data Encryption Standard, can be broken cheaply enough to make it unusuable for most purposes, especially in finance. At the 1999 International Conference on Financial Cryptography, MicroMint developers Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir -- two of the three developers of RSA public key cryptography -- showed how, with a few modifications, "Deep Crack" could be used to generate MicroMint coins. There is now interest in building a much larger commercial version of MicroMint. Putting a MicroMint machine on the web and linking it to existing cash-settlement financial networks like the Automatic Teller or Automated Clearinghouse systems, and a few regulatory changes, would allow one to withdraw and deposit MicroMint-based microcash from the internet in the same way that one could withdraw and deposit cash from an ATM. MicroMint coins could be used to pay for many small-value products and services, like MP3 files, streaming audio and video, controlled-access web-page content, value-added email postage, internet access, telephony and, possibly, with the incorporation of TCP/IP into power lines, electricity itself, someday. The ability to settle such transactions instantaneously and for cash should significantly reduce the administrative, financial, legal, and even engineering cost of anything sold on the internet. Ronald L. Rivest is the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is an Associate Director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, is a member of the lab's Theory of Computation Group and is a leader of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. Professor Rivest is an inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem, and a founder of RSA Data Security (now a subsidiary of Security Dynamics). He has served a Director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, the organizing body for the Eurocrypt and Crypto conferences, and as a founding Director of the International Financial Cryptography Association, the organizing body for the International Conference on Financial Cryptography Professor Rivest is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering. This meeting of the Digital Commerce Society of Boston will be held on Tuesday, June 1, 1999, from 12pm - 2pm at the Downtown Branch of the Harvard Club of Boston, on One Federal Street. The price for lunch is $32.50. This price includes lunch, room rental, various A/V hardware, and the speakers' lunch. The Harvard Club *does* have dress code: jackets and ties for men (and no sneakers or jeans), and "appropriate business attire" (whatever that means), for women. Fair warning: since we purchase these luncheons in advance, we will be unable to refund the price of your lunch if the Club finds you in violation of the dress code. We need to receive a company check, or money order, (or, if we *really* know you, a personal check) payable to "The Harvard Club of Boston", by Saturday, May 29th, or you won't be on the list for lunch. Checks payable to anyone else but The Harvard Club of Boston will have to be sent back. Checks should be sent to Robert Hettinga, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02131. Again, they *must* be made payable to "The Harvard Club of Boston", in the amount of $32.50. Please include your e-mail address so that we can send you a confirmation If anyone has questions, or has a problem with these arrangements (We've had to work with glacial A/P departments more than once, for instance), please let us know via e-mail, and we'll see if we can work something out. Upcoming speakers for DCSB are: July Tim Middelkoop Software Agents and Digital Commerce We are actively searching for future speakers. If you are in Boston on the first Tuesday of the month, and you are a principal in digital commerce, and would like to make a presentation to the Society, please send e-mail to the DCSB Program Commmittee, care of Robert Hettinga, <mailto: rahat_private>. For more information about the Digital Commerce Society of Boston, send "info dcsb" in the body of a message to <mailto: majordomoat_private> . If you want to subscribe to the DCSB e-mail list, send "subscribe dcsb" in the body of a message to <mailto: majordomoat_private> . We look forward to seeing you there! Cheers, Robert Hettinga Moderator, The Digital Commerce Society of Boston -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.5.5 iQEVAwUBNzb4T8UCGwxmWcHhAQHgUAf+Nlhd+nyd+zaVXkJtKzirdNDnxsrEeoGX Y+miCYSUlWEjYOgI88UBWZ8UxEfeT3CQ3CMMrzkmqfM1B9fTP50ucQhcUl3LGfYa XTy2SmE/tpITQotKTlq/AksqwG8SB7DloECMFxMTl0rtLvghDxzr9M+X/78SC7YY 8NTVJ/McWS5BOLezYeWmcoBSuurg/jJixzXxSSN3ktGxNXoVtH7xcq67z2RQY2fq 0c+4AgX/KooGhQPa4wLkdqfm5O6ehk/FVPgjVc9n01Xgf5Vz7gEfWF26X6lYGCBL 3G2yWShimROxMWxPz/MFQgVQAbx11WmTaA5y7b3iHtCCGXEOoTnZxA== =4PVM -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rahat_private> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "dcsb-requestat_private" with one line of text: "help". --- end forwarded text -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Hacker News Network [www.hackernews.com]
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