Analysis and Application of Accountable Certificate Management

In this paper, we consider the relation of non-repudiation and certificate management. In particular, we analyse a recent proposal by Buldas, Laud and Lipmaa (ACM CCS ’2000) for accountable certificate management and its application for use with SPKI certificates. The main idea of the accountable certificate management model is to provide undeniable attestations about the validity of any particular certificate. The model reduces a Certificate Authority’s possibilities of colluding with a user to produce contradicting evidence of a certificate’s validity. The model was developed for application with the legal system, and not for our “regular” PKIs we use every day. Consequently, it is not directly applicable for e.g. SPKI. Nevertheless, if we slightly modify both the model and the SPKI revocation syntax, the model does work in this setting as well. In this paper, we present some previously unpublished strengths and weaknesses of the accountable certificate management model. In addition, we have proposed a few modifications to the SPKI syntax to accomodate this model.