bye bye ViaCode

[Peter Gutmann]

"Brian Gladman" <brg@gladman.plus.com> writes:

>But far better models are now emerging in which the relying party approaches a
>certifying party *** at the time of a propsective key dependent transaction
>*** to detemine if the key(s) in question is/are valid.  This provides a full
>context in which key validation can take place and hence removes many of the
>hurdles to effective key certification.

This was the original certification model proposed in the 1970s before CAs were
invented (eg see Davies and Price, "Security for Computer Networks").
Unfortunately a lot of this early work has been lost, buried under the
avalanche of X.509 which followed it, so it's not easy to find information on
anything which doesn't follow the hierarchical centralised identity-CA model
(if anyone has any more historical references I'd be interested in hearing of
them).

Peter.