SPKI (Simple Public Key Infrastructure) [2, 1] was developed starting in 1995 to remedy shortcomings [3] in the existing ID certificate definitions: X.509 and {{PGP}} (see Pretty Good Privacy). It provided the first authorization certificate definition [4, 5]. Originally, SPKI used no names for keyholders but, after the merger with SDSI (Simple Distributed Security Infrastructure), now includes both named keyholders and named groups or roles—specifying authorization grants to names and definitions of names (membership in named groups).
In public-key security protocols, the remote party (the prover) in a transaction is authenticated via public key cryptography. Upon completion of that authentication, the verifierhas established that the prover has control over a particular private key—the key that corresponds to the public key the verifier used. This public key is itself a good identifier for the prover. It is a byte string that is globally unique. It also has the advantages of not...
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References
Ellison, Carl. SPKI/SDSI Certificates; http://theworld.com/~cme/html/spki.html
Ellison, Carl, Bill Frantz, Butler Lampson, Ronald Rivest, Brian Thomas, and Tatu Ylönen (1999). SPKI Certificate Theory, IETF RFC2693, September 1999, ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2693.txt
Ellison, Carl (2002). “Improvements on conventional PKI wisdom.” 1st Annual PKI Research Workshop, April 2002, http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~pki02/Ellison/
Blaze, Matt. KeyNote; http://www.crypto.com/trustmgt/kn.html
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11/N5231: XrML V.2 (MPEG-21 Rights Expression Language) http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/standards/mpeg-21/mpeg-21.htm#_Toc23297977
Dohrmann, Steve and Carl Ellison (2002). “Public-key support for collaborative groups.” 1st Annual PKI Research Workshop, April 2002, 139–148. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~pki02/Dohrmann/
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Ellison, C. (2005). SPKI/SDSI. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23483-7_409
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