Reducing the Dependence of SPKI/SDSI on PKI

Abstract. Trust-management systems address the authorization problem in distributed systems. They offer several advantages over other approaches, such as support for delegation and making authorization decisions in a decentralized manner. Nonetheless, trust-management systems such as KeyNote and SPKI/SDSI have seen limited deployment in the real world. One reason for this is that both systems require a public-key infrastructure (PKI) for authentication, and PKI has proven difficult to deploy, because each user is required to manage his/her own private/public key pair. The key insight of our work is that issuance of certificates in trust-management systems, a task that usually requires public-key cryptography, can be achieved using secret-key cryptography as well. We demonstrate this concept by showing how SPKI/SDSI can be modified to use Kerberos, a secret-key based authentication system, to issue SPKI/SDSI certificates. The resulting trustmanagement system retains all the capabilities...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ESORICS
• Authors: Hao Wang, Somesh Jha, Thomas W. Reps, Stefan Schwoon, Stuart G. Stubblebine
• Keywords: ESORICS 2006, Private/public Key Pair, Real World, Security Privacy, Trust-management Systems