Re: New Work Item Proposal: Revocation List 2020

On 5/13/20 12:53 PM, Nikos Fotiou wrote:
> Each CA maintains a different revocation bitvector per date. Each
> certificate belongs to the bitvector that corresponds to the
> certificate's expiration date. So suppose that a CA has generated 1K
> certificates that expire the same date, a client that wishes to
> verify the status of one of them will download in the worst case 1K
> bits.

Yes, I understood that... and that is useful... but it's not new nor is
it novel. There is prior art going back multiple decades covering
exactly what the paper you linked to is covering. I expect that no one
did a prior art search on the paper and it slipped through the academic
rigour firewall as a result. It happens.

I hesitate to post this to the mailing list, but will do so with the
following disclaimer.

DO NOT POST LINKS TO PATENTS TO THIS MAILING LIST, EVER.

There were a flurry of patents filed on this concept in the late 1990s
and early 2000s... all of them abandoned, because, well, the concept was
unpatentable. If you do a patent search, which you absolutely should not
do if you work for a corporation in the US (your legal counsel should do
it for you), you will find that there is a graveyard of abandoned patent
applications related to peer to peer networks and CRL bitvectors.

The paper you pointed to is a great idea... documenting a concept
discovered 20-30 years prior to the publication of the paper. :)

Even further, 20-30 years is being generous... here's the operating
manual for the ENIAC, the first electronic general-purpose digital
computer (circa 1945):

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfPennsylvania/eniac/ENIAC_Operating_Manual_Jun46.pdf

Documentation for testing the accumulators are on page 7. There are
punch card programs going back to the same years where the accumulators
were used to express mathematical membership in a set, where the bit was
active (1) if the item was in the set and inactive (0) when the item
wasn't in the set.

Same concept as the Revocation List 2020... from 65 years in the past.

What was old is new again. :)

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Veres One Decentralized Identifier Blockchain Launches
https://tinyurl.com/veres-one-launches

Received on Saturday, 16 May 2020 15:48:48 UTC