Assertion Schedule

Why?

As you may know, it takes you 50 points to become "Trusted" and 100 points to become a "notary". Given the attendance at an event of at least 3 35-point Notaries, this should not be a problem. However a start-up notary may only assign 10 points and needs to notarise several other people in order to raise his/her level. The following table shows how many points you are able to assign after how many notarisations:

There is clearly an issue here: hardly anyone would take the effort to visit 5 notaries who assign 10 points each, instead of visiting just 2 notaries who assign 35 points each. This way the 10-point notary will never get the chance to raise his/her level and therefore will not be visited by anyone. This issue is explored in further depth here: "Help! I'm a 10-point Notary. What can I do?"

Marco came up with the following idea: Notarising a notary does not make sense for the notary being notarised, because s/he has already 100 points or more and doesn't need more points, but it makes sense for the notary who notarises him/her, because s/he can raise his/her level according to the table above. This has been tried, but there is a catch (because of the way the Thawte online assertion mechanism works): you may not notarize in a symmetric way, i.e. A notarises B and B notarises A (plus, of course, you may not assert your own identity). The solution to this is to assert identities in a circular manner, i.e. A notarizes B, B notarizes C and C notarizes A.

Using this technique, given n notaries, notary i certifies notary (i + 1) mod n until (i + a) mod n where a < n/2 . (Isn't mathematics a nice way to express simple things in a complicated way?!). Since this scheme requires some planning, an MS-Excel Spreadsheet was created to do the hard work:

The "Matrix of Trust"

Select the link above to download the generic spreadsheet (created by Christian Barmala, edited and reproduced with permission). Some sample entries are already included - these should be amended accordingly. Also note that the spreadsheet only has space for up to 23 attendees at any event - some careful manipulation will be required if there are more than this.

The "Matrix" is used as follows:

• Attendee information is entered (by the event organiser) in the 'Attendees' sheet according to the following:
  • Column A - confirmed attendee's name
  • Column B - National Identity Code of attendee (as registered with Thawte)
  • Column C - Thawte ID (the ID used to log on to the Thawte Web of Trust system)
  • Column D - E-mail address (as 'trusted' by Thawte)
  • Column E - trust points the attendee has already accumulated
  • Column F - notarisation points (i.e. how many points the attendee is already able to grant, if appropriate)
  The relevant information will automatically be copied to the 'Assertions' sheet, and trust levels are automatically calculated
• Look up the row and the column with an attendee's name. Every non-empty cell means:

  "The person in the row notarises the person in the column, thereby assigning him/her the number of points indicated in the cell".

  Those who are not yet notaries, but will become notaries during the event, are listed with 0.2 points in order to stay on the safe side. Those whose notarisations happened in the past are marked with 0.1 points
• Look at the 3^rd lowest row in the column with your name. It shows how many copies of your ID documents you have to bring with you. It is a good idea to bring some extra to be safe. This is also the number of copies of the Thawte notarisation forms with your name that will be needed. These can be downloaded from the links at the bottom of https://www.thawte.com/cgi/personal/wot/assert.exe (you will need to log in to the system).
• The lowest 2 rows in the column with your name show your Trust points after the event. It should be > 100, i.e. after the event, you are a notary.
• Look at the rightmost column in the row with your name: it shows how many notarisations you will do during the event.
• The diagonal of the spreadsheet is "0", because you cannot assert your own identity. If you try to enter a number in a cell, you will get an error message in most cases. This validation formula ensures that you do not notarie someone who notarises you.

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