Ram A Moskovitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > It depends. Do you need third party identity verification? What is > the value of protecting the root key (do you have a hardened key > storage device if you need one)? Is privacy a concern?
an issue is what does the digital certificate represent ... if it just has some character string representing some information, a public key, and a valid digital signature from some 3rd party certification authority .... and that all digital certificates with valid digital signatures from that certification authority are treated as valid for the secured P2P network ... then possibly unanticipated digital certificates from that same 3rd party certification authority will be treated as valid (what discriminates a digital certificate for that specific secured P2P network from all digital certificates that may have been issued by that certification authority?). as an aside ... "certificate* authority is short-hand for *certification* authority .... the digital certificate is a representation of the certification process performed by the certification authority ... somewhat analogous to diplomas that some people might hang on their wall. Except for some institutions called *dimploma mills* ... the thing on the wall isn't a thing unto itself ... it is a representation of a specific process. It is intended for simple and/or low-value operations where the relying party has no other recourse to directly access the real information. For high value/integrity operations ... instead of relying on the representation of the process, the relying party will tend to directly access the real infoformation. a type of original design point for certification authorities and digital certificates ... was that the certificaiton authority would certify that the entity has a valid login to the system and the permissions the entity would have while logged onto the system .. and also certify the public key that the relying party/system should use for authenticating the entity. somebody could present a digital certificate from the correct certification authority and the relying system would allow them the corresponding access ... w/o having to maintain a list of valid logins and/or their permissions ... since the digital certificate would already carry that certified information. the public key design point for more real-time systems would have the infrastructure registering a public key in lieu of a pin or password (for authentication) ... w/o requiring a digital certificate http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#certless like a radius or kerberos authentication infrastructure simply upgraded for digital signature and public key operation w/o requiring any sort of independent certification authority http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#radius http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#kerberos the authentication and permissions are built into the basic system w/o requiring independent certificaiton. -- Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ _______________________________________________ mozilla-crypto mailing list [email protected] http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-crypto
