[tahoe-dev] Bringing Tahoe ideas to HTTP

[James A. Donald]

Brian Warner wrote:
 > I've no idea how hard it would be to write this sort
 > of plugin. But I'm pretty sure it's feasible, as would
 > be the site-building tools. If firefox had this
 > built-in, and web authors used it, what sorts of
 > vulnerabilities would go away? What sorts of new
 > applications could we build that would take advantage
 > of this kind of security?

Money transfer - we need a messaging system that passes
messages some of which represent promises and some of
which represent money and commitments.  Observe that
successful internet money transfer systems such as
webmoney generally use severely non standard security,
because standard security really does not work well
enough.  Paypal uses standard security, but disaster
predictably ensues, as scammers get hold of other
people's money and Paypal arbitration attempts to sort
out the ensuing chaos, which would be hard enough even if
Paypal arbitration was honest, energetic and competent,
rather than corrupt, lethargic, incompetent, demoralized
and despairing.

So if one is going to construct a non standard security
system with a non standard client, why not this one?