- From: Story Henry <henry.story@bblfish.net>
- Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2009 23:57:43 +0100
We started putting a wiki page together for this that will be kept up to date here: http://esw.w3.org/topic/foaf+ssl Henry On 9 Jan 2009, at 00:28, Story Henry wrote: > Dear WhatWG, > > I just subscribed to this list having noticed a thread earlier this > month on the topic of the <keygen> tag. As it happens we are working > on a protocol > foaf+ssl where keygen turns out to be extremely useful. It allows us > to create web services to give people very secure certificates which > can then be used to build a secure distributed social network based > on a web of trust. > > The foaf+ssl protocol works as it happens with most existing > browsers - though we have not done a detailed study of this yet (if > people could help this would be greatly appreciated). The protocol > is summarized here: > > http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/papers/foaf+ssl.html > > And you can find more on my blog at http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish . > > The discussion on <keygen> which produces spkac public keys which it > sends to the server can be found on the foaf-protocols mailing list > archive under 'spkac' > > http://lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-protocols/2009-January/date.html > > To tell you the truth I just discovered this tag recently myself, > wrote some code to test that it worked, found it to work on Opera, > Netscape, and Firefox, though it works slightly differently on each > platform. > > http://lists.foaf-project.org/pipermail/foaf-protocols/2009-January/000153.html > > I also put up a page on wikipedia: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spkac > > So please do keep the tag, and perhaps work on making it easier to > work with. > > Henry > > Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish > > > Ian Hickson wrote on January 6 2009: >> Over the years, several people (most of them bcc'ed) have asked for >> HTML5 to include a definition of <keygen>. Some have even gone as >> far as finding documentation on the element -- thank you. As I >> understand it based on the documentation, <keygen> basically >> generates a public/private asymmetric cryptographic key pair, and >> then sends the public component as its form value. Unfortunately, >> this seems completely and utterly useless, as at no point does >> there seem to be any way to ever use the private component either >> for signing or for decrypting anything, nor does there appear to be >> a way to use the certificate for authentication. Without further >> information along these lines describing how to actually make >> practical use of the element, I do not intend to document <keygen> >> in the HTML5 specification. If anyone can fill in these holes that >> would be very helpful. Cheers, > > > >
Received on Friday, 9 January 2009 14:57:43 UTC