Abstract

This paper examines trust in distributed systems. The particular example that we choose is that of key certification, although the techniques have more general application. Existing system do not provide sufficient evidence to help to resolve disputes. We address this problem. Keywords: Trust, certification, revocation, key management, evidence, authentication 1 Introduction Most people reading this paper will be regular users of distributed systems. When you use such a system, how do you authenticate yourself to remote machines? In a seminal paper Needham and Schroeder,[8] described trusted third parties that they called authentication servers. Such servers are trusted in the sense that they can masquerade as one of their clients but it can be extremely difficult for a client to prove that this has happened. Needham and Schroeder appear to assume that this does not happen. Another approach is for each client to choose a pair of keys (one public and one private) and for a certificat...

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