Barbara L. Fox

Encouraging recognition of fair uses in DRM systems

Create subsets of fair uses---safe harbors---that are allowed without the explicit permission of copyright holders.

GUMP: Grand Unified Meta-Protocols Recipes for Simple, Standards-Based Financial Cryptography

In this paper, we present a set of simple, all-parties-authenticated application protocol frameworks appropriate for a wide variety of financial applications running on the Internet. Collectively, we call these frameworks “GUMP”, for Grand Unified Meta-Protocols. The driving goal of the design is simplicity, so as to reduce dramatically the cost of engineering and deployment of application protocols. The simplicity of GUMP follows directly from a number of business-level premises, chief of which is that the client must digitally sign all transactions.

Panel: Public Key Infrastructure: PKIX, Signed XML or Something Else?

In January of 1999, after four years of discussion and debate, the Public-Key Infrastructure (PKIX) working group of the IETF finally published its Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate and CRL Profile (a.k.a. “PKIX Part 1”) [RFC 2459] as a Proposed Standard. Lack of a formal standard, however, did not deter individual software vendors from deploying products embodying their own interpretations of what would be in compliance with the end result of the working group. This market urgency has created a situation in which major “PKIX” software products “basically interoperate,” in that they agree on the message formats, but they do not necessarily “fully interoperate.” In the best case, they ignore anything their processing engines do not understand; in the worst case they simply fail.