Chaining through local names

On 5/11/15 at 11:26 AM, [email protected] (Ben Laurie) wrote:

> True, but I think beside the point - when is someone else's petname
> for someone supposed to be useful to me? Surely in general it can't
> be?

Well, SPKI got chained names in local spaces from SDSI (ref RFC 2693):

 ... long relevant discussion of names removed, look it up ...

2.6 Local Names

   Globally unique names may be politically undesirable and relatively
   useless, in the world of the Internet, but we use names all the time.

   The names we use are local names.  These are the names we write in
   our personal address books or use as nicknames or aliases with e-mail
   agents.  They can be IDs assigned by corporations (e.g., bank account
   numbers or employee numbers).  Those names or IDs do not need to be
   globally unique.  Rather, they need to be unique for the one entity
   that maintains that address book, e-mail alias file or list of
   accounts.  More importantly, they need to be meaningful to the person
   who uses them as indexes.

   Ron Rivest and Butler Lampson showed with SDSI 1.0 [SDSI] that one
   can not only use local names locally, one can use local names
   globally.  The clear security advantage and operational simplicity of
   SDSI names caused us in the SPKI group to adopt SDSI names as part of
   the SPKI standard.

2.6.1 Basic SDSI Names

   A basic SDSI 2.0 name is an S-expression with two elements: the word
   "name" and the chosen name.  For example,

        george:  (name fred)

   represents a basic SDSI name "fred" in the name space defined by
   george.

2.6.2 Compound SDSI Names

   If fred in turn defines a name, for example,

        fred:  (name sam)

   then george can refer to this same entity as

        george:  (name fred sam)

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