Certificate chain discovery in SPKI?SDSI

  • Authors:
  • Dwaine Clarke;Jean-Emile Elien;Carl Ellison;Matt Fredette;Alexander Morcos;Ronald L. Rivest

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computer Security
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

SPKI/SDSI is a novel public-key infrastructure emphasizing naming,groups, ease-of-use, and flexible authorization. To access aprotected resource, a client must present to the server a proofthat the client is authorized; this proof takes the form of acertificate chain proving that the client's public key is in one ofthe groups on the resource's ACL, or that the client's public keyhas been delegated authority (in one or more stages) from a key inone of the groups on the resource's ACL.While finding such a chain can be nontrivial, due to theflexible naming and delegation capabilities of SPKI/SDSIcertificates, we present a practical and efficient algorithm forthis problem of certificate chain discovery. We also present atight worst-case bound on its running time, which is polynomial inthe length of its input. We also present an extension of our algorithm that is capableof handling threshold subjects, where several principals arerequired to co-sign a request to access a protected resource.