Keynote Address: The Changing Environment

Abstract

What I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about is changes it the environment and purpose in which protocols are conducted. When Mike Schroder and I wrote our paper in 1977, published in 1978, one of the things we did was to be quite explicit about what we assumed to do with the environment. We assumed that we had principals, whether human or mechanical, that wanted to establish a secure connection, and the assumption was that the principals themselves worked in the way they were supposed to work. If they were people they were honest people, if they were programs they were correct programs. But the environment was thoroughly wicked and everything about the environment conducted itself so as to cause the whole procedure to fail if it possibly could.