Nick Szabo

∗April 5, 1964

Computer scientist, legal scholar, and smart-contract pioneer

O osobě

American computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer. Coined "smart contracts" (1994) and proposed bit gold (1998), a direct precursor to Bitcoin. Author of "Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes" and other essays on minimizing institutional trust through cryptographic protocol design.

Texty

Nick Szabo · 2001 · 18 min

Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes

Szabo's 2001 essay argues that every "trusted third party" (TTP) invoked in a security protocol is itself a security hole — a vulnerability that must be plugged at great cost. Certificate authorities, DNS registries, and similar institutions became the most expensive and failure-prone parts of PKI and the web not despite cryptography but because protocol designers assumed TTPs away instead of minimizing them.