Re: Attribute certificate

      The X509Certificate element appears to restrict the certificate
specified to a v3 certificate, thus excluding attribute certificates.  IMO
it would be better to put an AC into a SignatureProperty anyway, so the
signer could sign which AC he intends to use.  RFC 2634 has a place to put
AC's, and section 1.3.4 of that specification says in that regard that
"signingCertificate MUST be carried in a SignedAttributes".  It is not
clear that you can use AC's as an alternative to PKC's to specify the
signer in RFC 2630.  I would think that you might not be able to because
you have to specify the signer by issuerAndSerialNumber or by
subjectKeyIdentifier, and issuerAndSerialNumber uses version 1 to indicate
backward compatibility with PKCS#7 before the days of AC's.
      Anyway, if people agree with me that a SignatureProperty is the right
place for an AC in this format, should we standardize a format and name
one?  My own guess would be that the name of this signature property would
be "AttributeCert" (if people prefer to be wordy and spell out Certificate
they are welcome to) and that its format would be the binary value of the
AC converted to base 64, just as for X509Certificate.  However, there is no
place to include the chain of certificates leading to an AC.  CRL's are not
constrained to point at PKC's by the definition of X509Data, so you can put
your CRL's there.
      Do we need a chain for AC's as well?  A very simple way to do it
would be to require that the contents of the AttributeCert
SignatureProperty be a delimited ordered set of certificates.  Since any
subsequent certificates in the path may be either AC's or PKC's, we must
distinguish between them and the two simplest ways I can think of are
either by a rule that an AC follows a comma while a PKC follows a colon, or
by preceding all PKC's in the list by "P:".  Somebody else can come up with
more native-XML like syntax if they wish.

            Tom Gindin


Serge Dussault <serge.dussault@ramq.gouv.qc.ca>@w3.org on 03/22/2002
02:12:37 PM

Sent by:    w3c-ietf-xmldsig-request@w3.org


To:    "'w3c-ietf-xmldsig@w3.org'" <w3c-ietf-xmldsig@w3.org>
cc:
Subject:    Attribute certificate


Hi, is it possible to use a attribute certificate in this specification
(XML-DSIG)?

If yes, is it possible to have a sample code?

Thanks

Serge Dussault
Soutien au développement
Régie de l'assurance maladie du Québec

Tél. : (418) 682-5159 poste 4570
Téléc. : (418) 528-9231
Courriel : serge.dussault@ramq.gouv.qc.ca

Received on Friday, 22 March 2002 20:25:13 UTC