- From: Rich Salz <rsalz@datapower.com>
- Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 14:08:08 -0500
- To: Joseph Swaminathan <jswamina@cisco.com>
- Cc: Anders Rundgren <anders.rundgren@telia.com>, w3c-ietf-xmldsig@w3.org
> A novice question. Pardon me if it is obvious. > What is the need for signing the X509 certificate. Suppose I have a single keypair, but multiple certificates for that pair. For example, I might have a cert that identifies me as an employee, for signing email, and I might have a cert that identifies me as an officer of the company, for signing official documents. Unless I sign the cert, I can swap the two roles, and the receiver cannot tell. Even worse, a "fraudulent" or irrespoinsible CA can mint a new certificate for my public key that contains all sorts of things. Unless the receiver does full cert-chain validation (and really, who does that? nobody:), they can be fooled by this fraudulent cert. /r$ -- Rich Salz, Chief Security Architect DataPower Technology http://www.datapower.com XS40 XML Security Gateway http://www.datapower.com/products/xs40.html XML Security Overview http://www.datapower.com/xmldev/xmlsecurity.html
Received on Thursday, 11 March 2004 13:56:40 UTC