Victor Duchovni wrote: > So with Kerberos the word hasW its narrower "named security entity" > technical meaning. With X.509 one tends to talk of "subjects", "issuers", > "registration authorities", "certification authorities", ... and the word > "principal" is less common.
part of this has been that x.509 has layered certification authorities, digital certificates and other business processes on top of any direct interaction between parties. as a result, the focus of x.509 related descriptions tends to focus on the certification processes and the acceptance of those certification processes by relying parties. (along with any digital certificate representation of those certification processes) credentials, certificates, licenses, diplomas, letters of credit/introduction and other mechanisms have served the world for centuries ... providing information to relying parties, where the relying parties didn't have the information themselves and/or have direct mechanisms for obtaining the information. digital certificates has been electronic analog of those centuries old constructs for representation of information for use by relying parties (where the relying parties have no direct access to the information and/or other mechanisms for obtaining the information). in my merged security taxonomy and glossary collected from a variety of resources http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#glosnote aka: Security Terms merged from: AFSEC, AJP, CC1, CC2, CC21 (CC site), CIAO, FCv1, FFIEC, FJC, FTC, IATF V3 (IATF site), IEEE610, ITSEC, Intel, JTC1/SC27 (SC27 site), KeyAll, MSC, NIST 800-30, 800-33, 800-37, 800-53, 800-61, 800-77, 800-83 FIPS140, NASA, NCSC/TG004, NIAP, NSA Intrusion, CNSSI 4009, online security study, RFC1983, RFC2504, RFC2647, RFC2828, TCSEC, TDI, TNI, vulnerability testing and misc. Updated 20060202 with terms from 800-77, 800-83 the only definition for principal comes from sc27: principal An entity whose identity can be authenticated. [SC27] the merged taxonomy and glossaries from X9F (including some x.509 sources), i.e. X9F Terms merged from X9F document glossaries: WD15782, X509, X9.8, X9.24, X9.31, X9.42, X9.45, X9.49, X9.52, X9.62, X9.65, X9.69. Terms from ABA/ASC X9 TR1-1999 replace terms from X9F TG-16 glossary (identified by lower case x9 instead of upper-case X9). Original source documents include: X3.92, X3.106, x9.1, x9.5, x9.6, x9.8, x9.9, x9.17, x9.19, x9.23, x9.24, x9.26, x9.28, x9.30, x9.31, x9.41, x9.42, x9.44, x9.45, x9.49, x9.52, x9.55, x9.57, x9.62, x9.69 x9.74, x9.76, x9.78, x9.80, x9.82, and TG-17. (990710) doesn't include a definition for principal. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]