Author: Gregory Maxwell 2013-10-26 04:06:48
Published on: 2013-10-26T04:06:48+00:00
In an email conversation between Luke-Jr and Gavin, the question is posed about the usefulness of additional encryption over Tor. It is noted that Tor is already encrypted end-to-end, but x.509 in the payment protocol provides authentication and non-repudiation rather than confidentiality. This is used to sign the payment request so that there is cryptographic evidence in case of a dispute. The payment protocol is extensible and could support namecoin authenticated messages and GPG authenticated messages, but these would require a fair amount of code. On the other hand, adding tor onion support would only require a few lines of code since it could just be the existing x.509 mechanism with a simple special validation rule for .onion, plus a little tool to repack the keys. It is believed that this would easily be more widely used than namecoin. Finally, Luke-Jr plans to check with the tor folks to see if anyone has ever thought of doing this before and if there is already a canonical structure for the x.509 certs used in this way.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T17:37:42.603224+00:00