The global Internet trust register (1999 ed)

The development of electronic commerce and other applications on the Internet is held up by concerns about security.

Cryptography - the science of codes and ciphers - will be a significant part of the solution, but one of the problems is enabling users to find out which cryptographic keys belong to whom.

The main things that can go wrong are similar to those that can go wrong with a signature stamp - it can be stolen, or counterfeit or it may not belong to the person one thought it did.

This text seeks to help solve the third risk. It aims to cut through the chaos by publishing the thousand or so keys in paper form, as a kind of global phone book.

The secondary aim is political: by printing the keys on paper, established legal protections can be used to limit government interference.