Understanding Public-Key Infrastructure: Concepts, Standards, and Deployment Considerations

SPKI

The Simple Public Key Infrastructure (SPKI) IETF Working Group was created in 1996 as an alternative to the PKIX effort. One of the fundamental premises of this group was that X.509 is a complicated and bulky certificate format that, by explicitly binding a key pair to an identity, rests upon an inherently flawed foundation. The proponents of SPKI argue that the concept of a globally unique identity (that is, an X.500 DistinguishedName, as adopted by X.509) will never be realized. Instead, they advocate the idea of the public key as the identity of relevance. Where necessary and meaningful, a name or other identifying information may be associated with the key (building on the work in "SDSI—A Simple Distributed Security Infrastructure" ...