Who should attend: Programmers and managers who have to design or select systems using public key cryptography for strong access control or other situations in which the guarantee of trust is critical.

In 1976, Diffie and Hellman postulated a telephone directory, but with public keys instead of phone numbers, to take the place of couriers carrying keys between people to open secure channels. This suggestion has grown into public key certificates, binding names to keys, and to suggestions for national or global Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs). Many people advocate using such certificates or PKIs without realizing what they are getting in return. They take the word of professional cryptographers.

Professional cryptographers, meanwhile, are sloppy in their use of words (using "name" and "identity" as if they were interchangeable) and using "trust" without any qualifiers (as in "In God We Trust").

In fact, each kind of certificate empowers a public key in some way. This tutorial will teach people how to identify what kind of empowerment they need for their public keys and how to achieve that empowerment. It will describe a variety of different certificate formats (X.509, Attribute Cert, PGP, SDSI, SPKI, PolicyMaker) and describe the kind of empowerment each offers.

Time and interest permitting, the tutorial will also cover US Government proposals for using PKIs to achieve Government Access to Keys - although this may be moot by the time of the tutorial (depending on congressional and judicial events).

Carl Ellison is a professional cryptographer who has been researching certification for over two years now. He is draft author for the IETF standard track certificate structure known as SPKI. In addition to his cryptography background, Carl has expertise in networking, operating systems, real time computer graphics, fault tolerance and digital signal processing.

Tutorials at-a-Glance     Symposium Speakers