jcmoon - 5:22 pm on Jan 16, 2007 (gmt 0)

Seems like a good enough idea, and rather secure. I agree that it would make phishers need to work in near real-time, and that would make life more difficult for them.

It's true, though, that if you add all of your financial relationships together, that's quite a keyring.

It's rather wishful thinking to consider this an end to spam, though. All this will be is a decline in the (current) most-popular phishing targets. PayPal & eBay won't be as big of targets anymore, and as new institutions (banks, mutual fund / investment houses, insurance companies, etc) sign on, there will be fewer targets.

It means there will be fewer scammers & phishers, which's good, but the ones that are left will be the most-sophisticated ones. They'd have to have well-developed profiles on people (they'd have to know which bank you use, as opposed to send the phishing scam for the same bank to 5000 people).

Their life would be difficult, but not impossible. But, that's at least a step forward from where we are now ...