Talking to someone who was at the legendary cypherpunks anniversary bbq. He brought up the fact that someone there was talking about "private hedonistic cells" (any errors are mine, not his, and whoever talked about this, if they have any more thoughts on the matter, please feel free to email me.)
Brought this to mind. Identity Based Encryption schemes. Fairly unworkable on the global scale for a number of reasons. Shrink the space. Say a small group. Split the secret for the key issuer, probably using a k-of-n scheme, where any new member needs k people to give k pieces of the new secret key to the new member. Transparent encryption to group members. Use broadcast encryption things for mail to group members, or subsets thereof. Open problems: Can you have an easily extensible k-of-n scheme? Or even an n-of-n? Key problem here being the fact that the former scheme is still valid, just ignore the fact that there's a new member. k would obviously be configurable based on group policies, number needed to instantiate a new member, and all that good stuff. What else can you do with a formulation like this? What else would be -useful- given a formulation like this? Proofs of membership to the outside? To other group members? Anonymity inside the group? Conditional anonymity subject to open by k (not necessarily the same k as before) members? Homogoneous front to the outside world? Internal cash? Group-generated random schemes? Mental poker put to some purpose? -- All that is not strictly forbidden is now mandatory.
