Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-spki-cert-structure-04.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 1997 12:01:39 -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		: Simple Public Key Certificate
	Author(s)	: B. Lampson, T. Ylonen, R. Rivest, 
                          W. Frantz, C. Ellison, B. Thomas
	Filename	: draft-ietf-spki-cert-structure-04.txt
	Pages		: 48
	Date		: 04-Dec-97
	
   This document specifies 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 SPKI 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, it can lead to 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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