Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-spki-cert-theory-00.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 01 Dec 1997 13:17:36 -0500

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
This draft is a work item of the Simple Public Key Infrastructure Working Group of the IETF.

	Title		: SPKI Certificate Theory
	Author(s)	: B. Lampson, R. Rivest, B. Frantz, C. Ellison, 
                          B. Thomas, Y. Ylonen
	Filename	: draft-ietf-spki-cert-theory-00.txt
	Pages		: 30
	Date		: 26-Nov-97
	
   The SPKI Working Group has developed a standard form of digital
   certificate that is both more general and simpler than what is
   traditionally considered to be a certificate.  Since the word
   ''certificate'' was first used by Loren Kohnfelder in 1978 to refer to
   a signed record holding a name and a public key, it has been assumed
   that the only purpose of a certificate has been to bind a public key
   to a globally unique name and therefore to a person.  This binding
   was assumed both necessary and sufficient for security.
 
   The working group has found that the creation of a globally unique
   name is neither necessary nor sufficient for Internet security or
   electronic commerce.  In fact, use of global names can introduce a
   security flaw.  Therefore, we define certificate forms for binding
   local names to keys (to retain security while offering the
   convenience of meaningful names) and for assigning authorizations to
   keys (to provide adequate information for real applications).  These
   forms can be used alone or together.

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