On Tue, 21 Oct 2008, David Conrad wrote:
On Oct 21, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Matt Larson wrote:
This choice was a very conscious decision to avoid concentrating control of the KSK in any single organization.
That's not what I'm questioning. I don't think any proposal is putting control in any single organization. Given the importance of the KSK, the question is why would you ever want a situation where N is less than M.
I think you mean "M is less than N".
It seems to me that lack of unanimity of the key (part) holders would be just crazy.
M < N allows for some parties not to be present, which might be reasonable depending on which parties make up the N. (As a practical matter, when hardware-based authorization tokens are used, M is always less than N, with additional tokens held in escrow or otherwise kept safe, so a failure can be tolerated.) Matt