Carl Ellison. Establishing Identity Without Certification Authorities. In Proc. Sixth USENIX Security Symposium, pages 6776, Berkeley, 1996. Usenix.
Again, this is a fellow who is basically a systems researcher, not a cryptographer as such (he has no publications in crypto theory to my knowledge), and he was publishing good ideas along these lines back in '96.
Posted Sep 6, 2010 3:26 UTC (Mon) by zooko (subscriber, #2589)
[Link]
Oh, and I see that Rivest's SDSI 1.0 in '96 cites:
Matt Blaze, Joan Feigenbaum, and Jack Lacy. Decentralized trust management. In Proceedings 1996 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, page (to appear), May 1996.
Also real cryptographers.
But I should emphasize that while SDSI and to a lesser extent PolicyMaker were influential, these were exceptions to the centralized hierarchical PKI model that dominated cryptography, and they were too late. By 1996 the damage had already been done when Netscape engineers baked the PKI model into their socket encryption protocol, SSL.
Transport-level encryption with Tcpcrypt
Posted Sep 6, 2010 3:27 UTC (Mon) by zooko (subscriber, #2589)
[Link]
I wrote "by 1996 the damage had already been done...", but I meant that it had already been done two years earlier, when Netscape invented SSL.
Okay I'm definitely going to stop following-up to myself now. :-)