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Modeling Public Key Infrastructures in the Real World

  • Conference paper
Public Key Infrastructure (EuroPKI 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 3545))

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Abstract

PKIs are complex distributed systems that are responsible for giving users enough information to make reasonable trust judgments about one another. Since the currencies of PKI are trust and certificates, users who make trust decisions (often called relying parties) must do so using only some initial trust beliefs about the PKI and some pile of certificates (and other assertions) they received from the PKI. Given a certificate, a relying party needs to conclude that the keyholder described by the certificate actually possesses the properties described by the certificate. In this paper, we present a calculus that allows relying parties to make such trust judgements. Our calculus extends Maurer’s deterministic model, and is focused on real world issues such as time, revocation, delegation, and heterogeneous certificate formats. We then demonstrate how our calculus can be used to reason about numerous situations that arise in practice.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. BindView Corporation and Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College,  

    John Marchesini & Sean Smith

Authors
  1. John Marchesini
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  2. Sean Smith
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, UK

    David Chadwick

  2. The Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, CT2 7NF, Canterbury, UK

    Gansen Zhao

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Marchesini, J., Smith, S. (2005). Modeling Public Key Infrastructures in the Real World. In: Chadwick, D., Zhao, G. (eds) Public Key Infrastructure. EuroPKI 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3545. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11533733_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11533733_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28062-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31585-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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