It may be argued that the introducer should not be trusted to choose a secret to be shared by the other sites. Even in the public key scheme, however, the introducer can create a man-in-the-middle that has the public key of the original designee. This conundrum is tantamount to the unresolved EQ problem. If an agent receives a key from just one source and has no other source of validation for that key, then the source can supply any key and the agent must trust the source concerning the key, When there are other ways to validate the key then the agent may be able to trust the key more than it trusts the source. An elementary example is when the factory receives a space bank key from a requestor. The agent (factory here) consults a previously held bank transformer concerning the validity of the proffered bank key. Subsequently the agent can count on bank properties by virtue of the response from the transformer. The key equality primitive (DISCRIM) is the conceptual foundation for such validation in Keykos.