WebID-ISSUE-20: Portable and Hosted Certificates [WebID Spec]

WebID-ISSUE-20: Portable and Hosted Certificates [WebID Spec]

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/track/issues/20

Raised by: Nathan Rixham
On product: WebID Spec


The WebID protocol currently requires the use of X.509v3 certificates, those certificates need to be stored on the client side and sent as part of the TLS authentication process.

However, provision is made in the Transport Layer Security (TLS) Extensions RFC [1] for certificates to be passed by URL, rather than value, by using the "Client Certificate URLs" feature [2].

It should be noted that this feature is already standardized and covers most of the WebID protocol in a well defined manner, indeed it has almost all the key elements of "WebID".

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4366
[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4366#section-3.3