Survey regarding the future of PKI trust networks ------------------------------------------------------
Traditionally certificates have been purchased (or just issued) for an entity by a party that is concerned that the entity can be properly identified in authentication- and signature-operations. For a relying party (RP) to check certificate-status has mostly been a public and free service. The financial industry however, have in several recent PKI-ventures shown that they intend to change this by treating lookup-services as equivalent to payment transactions, where the RP's bank is used as a "trust clearing center" communicating with the subscriber's bank that must be a member of the same "trust network". To make it technically impossible for RPs to fully verify signatures without going through the trust network (and paying for the services), root-certificates are usually not "published". I would be very happy to hear what the PKI community in general think about this scheme as the future for PKI. Off-list responses will be treated as CONFIDENTIAL information. Anders Rundgren
