Re: Cypherpunk Certification Authority

[Eric Young <eay@mincom.oz.au>]

On Mon, 27 Nov 1995, Jyri Kaljundi wrote:
> What software there is available (preferably non-commercial) to become a 
> CA? Is for example the SSLeay package enough?

I'm just making a quick comment on this point.  The current SSLeay setup, 
I would say no.  You can do it but you need to write more stuff to do it 
correctly.  It is a bit of an evil cludge.

The next version should be able to do this (I hope, depending on time).
The next version has (will have) several different ways to 'retrieve'
certificates which can be added via an run time API (the application can
'push' new methods into the library during startup). I will probably not
have time to put in a 'socket' based certificate server but it should be
simple enough for this to be written by other people. It should also be
simple enough for other people to write some routines that conform to the
API so that the netscape DB files can be accessed by SSLeay (along with
the current SSLeay 'hash directories' and the socket based lookup (if it
gets put in)). 

The most importaint change is that I will support CRL if they are 
present and probably generate an 'warning' if there is no CRL.  I still 
need to write a simple application to do a basic 'keep track of issued 
certificates' and generate a CRL if required.  The library routines to 
write a CA are present, they just need to be glued to a simple database 
(which I will probably do in my demo case via ascii files in directories).

This version will also hopefully support the concept of selecting a 
certificate/private key from a set of certificates, attempting to pick a 
certificate that is in the same 'tree' as another certificate.

This concept of multiple certificates for a person is useful for
SSLtelnet, so that each 'host domain' can issue it's own certificates (and
keep track of it's own CRL).  To let some-one login, just issue them with
a 'certificate' for that 'host domain'. 

eric
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Eric Young                  | Signature removed since it was generating
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