> About the certificate and the chain: the chain will add a lot of
> redundant information, at least as I see it, since each component of
> the chain will most obviously be in separate certificate entries.

I tend to agree, but wanted to start close to any model API first.
Makes it easier to explain why we diverged later.  Consider the cert 
chain gone.

> bear> A "KEY ENTRY" may contain a key alone (secret key), or a key and 
> bear> certificate (private key).
> 
> Hmm, some of what you say is a little bit confusing.  First of all,
> most people use "private key" for what you call "secret key" (they use
> "secret key" for it as well...).

(Remember, a lot of those descriptions were from the javadoc, not my
own words.)

I read the description as pointing out, with some validity, that a
"private" key implies there's also a public key, and public keys are
published in certs.  So if you have a cert, you can use the key as a
private key.

But without a cert, you can't use the key as a private key.  But it's
still usable - it can even be used similiarly to any symmetric cipher
key - so they just came up with a name for it.

> A search pattern could be a vector of tuples <OID, value> or
> something like that, and the application could be given the
> possibility to send down a callback to the plug-in, which could help
> doing the selection given a certificate and a chunk of database
> attributes.

Okay, that makes sense.  Spend too much time deep in SQL and Berkeley
databases and you tend forget about things like callbacks. :-)
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