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SPKI
Simple public key infrastructure (SPKI, pronounced ''spoo-key'') was an attempt to overcome the complexity of traditional X.509 public key infrastructure. It was specified in two Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC) specifications— and —from the IETSPKI working group These two RFCs never passed the "experimental" maturity level of the IETF's RFC status. The SPKI specification defined an authorization certificate format, providing for the delineation of privileges, rights or other such attributes (called authorizations) and binding them to a public key. In 1996, SPKI was merged with Simple Distributed Security Infrastructure (SDSI, pronounced ''sudsy'') by Ron Rivest and Butler Lampson. History and overview The original SPKI had identified principals only as public keys but allowed binding authorizations to those keys and delegation of authorization from one key to another. The encoding used was attribute:value pairing, similar to headers. The ori ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Public Key Infrastructure
A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of roles, policies, hardware, software and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. The purpose of a PKI is to facilitate the secure electronic transfer of information for a range of network activities such as e-commerce, internet banking and confidential email. It is required for activities where simple passwords are an inadequate authentication method and more rigorous proof is required to confirm the identity of the parties involved in the communication and to validate the information being transferred. In cryptography, a PKI is an arrangement that ''binds'' public keys with respective identities of entities (like people and organizations). The binding is established through a process of registration and issuance of certificates at and by a certificate authority (CA). Depending on the assurance level of the binding, this may be carried out by an automa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
S-expression
In computer programming, an S-expression (or symbolic expression, abbreviated as sexpr or sexp) is an expression in a like-named notation for nested list (tree-structured) data. S-expressions were invented for and popularized by the programming language Lisp, which uses them for source code as well as data. In the usual parenthesized syntax of Lisp, an S-expression is classically definedJohn McCarthy (1960/2006)Recursive functions of symbolic expressions. Originally published in Communications of the ACM. as # an atom of the form ''x'', or # an expression of the form (''x'' . ''y'') where ''x'' and ''y'' are S-expressions. This definition reflects LISP's representation of a list as a series of "cells", each one an ordered pair. In plain lists, ''y'' points to the next cell (if any), thus forming a list. The recursive clause of the definition means that both this representation and the S-expression notation can represent any binary tree. However, the representation can in princi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Canonical S-expressions
A Canonical S-expression (or csexp) is a binary encoding form of a subset of general S-expression (or sexp). It was designed for use in SPKI to retain the power of S-expressions and ensure canonical form for applications such as digital signatures while achieving the compactness of a binary form and maximizing the speed of parsing. The particular subset of general S-expressions applicable here is composed of atoms, which are byte strings, and parentheses used to delimit lists or sub-lists. These S-expressions are fully recursive. While S-expressions are typically encoded as text, with spaces delimiting atoms and quotation marks used to surround atoms that contain spaces, when using the canonical encoding each atom is encoded as a length-prefixed byte string. No whitespace separating adjacent elements in a list is permitted. The length of an atom is expressed as an ASCII decimal number followed by a ":". Example The sexp (this "Canonical S-expression" has 5 atoms) becomes the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SPKAC
SPKAC is an acronym that stands for Signed Public Key and Challenge, also known as Netscape SPKI. It is a format for sending a Certification Signing Request: it encodes a public key, that can be manipulated using OpenSSL. It is created using the little documented HTML keygen element inside a number of Netscape compatible browsers. Standardisation There exists an ongoing effort to standardise SPKAC through an Internet Draft in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The purpose of this work has been to formally define what has existed prior as a de facto standard, and to address security deficiencies, particular with respect to historic insecure use of MD5 that has since been declared unsafe for use with digital signatures as per RFC 6151. Implementations HTML5 originally specified the <keygen> element to support SPKAC in the browser to make it easier to create client side certificates through a web service for protocols such as WebID; however, subsequent work for HTM ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Internet Engineering Task Force
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and all its participants are volunteers. Their work is usually funded by employers or other sponsors. The IETF was initially supported by the federal government of the United States but since 1993 has operated under the auspices of the Internet Society, an international non-profit organization. Organization The IETF is organized into a large number of working groups and birds of a feather informal discussion groups, each dealing with a specific topic. The IETF operates in a bottom-up task creation mode, largely driven by these working groups. Each working group has an appointed chairperson (or sometimes several co-chairs); a charter that describes its focus; and what it is expected to produce, and when. It is open to all who want to particip ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Request For Comments
A Request for Comments (RFC) is a publication in a series from the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the Internet, most prominently the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An RFC is authored by individuals or groups of engineers and computer scientists in the form of a memorandum describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems. It is submitted either for peer review or to convey new concepts, information, or, occasionally, engineering humor. The IETF adopts some of the proposals published as RFCs as Internet Standards. However, many RFCs are informational or experimental in nature and are not standards. The RFC system was invented by Steve Crocker in 1969 to help record unofficial notes on the development of ARPANET. RFCs have since become official documents of Internet specifications, communications protocols, procedures, and events. According to Crocker, the doc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ron Rivest
Ronald Linn Rivest (; born May 6, 1947) is a cryptographer and an Institute Professor at MIT. He is a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. Rivest is one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm (along with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman). He is the inventor of the symmetric key encryption algorithms RC2, RC4, RC5, and co-inventor of RC6. The "RC" stands for "Rivest Cipher", or alternatively, "Ron's Code". (RC3 was broken at RSA Security during development; similarly, RC1 was never published.) He also authored the MD2, MD4, MD5 and MD6 cryptographic hash functions. Education Rivest earned a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Yale University in 1969, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1974 for rese ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Butler Lampson
Butler W. Lampson, ForMemRS, (born December 23, 1943) is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing. Education and early life After graduating from the Lawrenceville School (where in 2009 he was awarded the Aldo Leopold Award, also known as the Lawrenceville Medal, Lawrenceville's highest award to alumni), Lampson received an A.B. in physics (''magna cum laude'' with highest honors in the discipline) from Harvard University in 1964 and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967. Career and research During the 1960s, Lampson and others were part of Project GENIE at UC Berkeley. In 1965, several Project GENIE members, specifically Lampson and Peter Deutsch, developed the Berkeley Timesharing System for Scientific Data Systems' SDS 940 computer. After completing his doctorate, Lampson stayed on at UC Berkeley as an assistant p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Public Key
Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic algorithms based on mathematical problems termed one-way functions. Security of public-key cryptography depends on keeping the private key secret; the public key can be openly distributed without compromising security. In a public-key encryption system, anyone with a public key can encrypt a message, yielding a ciphertext, but only those who know the corresponding private key can decrypt the ciphertext to obtain the original message. For example, a journalist can publish the public key of an encryption key pair on a web site so that sources can send secret messages to the news organization in ciphertext. Only the journalist who knows the corresponding private key can decrypt the ciphertexts to obtain the sources' messages—an eavesdropp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Access Control List
In computer security, an access-control list (ACL) is a list of permissions associated with a system resource (object). An ACL specifies which users or system processes are granted access to objects, as well as what operations are allowed on given objects. Each entry in a typical ACL specifies a subject and an operation. For instance, if a file object has an ACL that contains , this would give Alice permission to read and write the file and give Bob permission only to read it. Implementations Many kinds of operating systems implement ACLs or have a historical implementation; the first implementation of ACLs was in the filesystem of Multics in 1965. Filesystem ACLs A filesystem ACL is a data structure (usually a table) containing entries that specify individual user or group rights to specific system objects such as programs, processes, or files. These entries are known as access-control entries (ACEs) in the Microsoft Windows NT, OpenVMS, and Unix-like operating systems s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Base64
In computer programming, Base64 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes that represent binary data (more specifically, a sequence of 8-bit bytes) in sequences of 24 bits that can be represented by four 6-bit Base64 digits. Common to all binary-to-text encoding schemes, Base64 is designed to carry data stored in binary formats across channels that only reliably support text content. Base64 is particularly prevalent on the World Wide Web where one of its uses is the ability to embed image files or other binary assets inside textual assets such as HTML and CSS files. Base64 is also widely used for sending e-mail attachments. This is required because SMTP – in its original form – was designed to transport 7-bit ASCII characters only. This encoding causes an overhead of 33–37% (33% by the encoding itself; up to 4% more by the inserted line breaks). Design Each Base64 digit can take on 64 different values, encoding 6 bits of data. Which characters are chosen to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Certificate Authority
In cryptography, a certificate authority or certification authority (CA) is an entity that stores, signs, and issues digital certificates. A digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate. This allows others (relying parties) to rely upon signatures or on assertions made about the private key that corresponds to the certified public key. A CA acts as a trusted third party—trusted both by the subject (owner) of the certificate and by the party relying upon the certificate. The format of these certificates is specified by the X.509 or EMV standard. One particularly common use for certificate authorities is to sign certificates used in HTTPS, the secure browsing protocol for the World Wide Web. Another common use is in issuing identity cards by national governments for use in electronically signing documents. Overview Trusted certificates can be used to create secure connections to a server via the Internet. A certificate is e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
