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finding public keys
Just to leave aside all these interesting matters of specification
languages and X.509 versus ... (aside: anyone for re-using the PGP
formats ? :-) if only for a moment:
How do I find some(body|thing)'s public key ?
This seems to be quite an important question, perhaps the most
important issue in building a real public key infrastructure, and I'm
surprised not to have seen much discussion of it either on the PKIX
list - or this one so far ? It has, however, been discussed a little
on the cypherpunks list recently. Check out the latter stages of the
"A brief comparison of email encryption protocols" thread in the
archives - [1].
Seems to me that, if nothing else, it might be useful if this group
produced an specification which could be followed for looking up
(somehow) the public key for an entity, given say an associated
Internet domain name ? In practice I suppose this could be done in
such a way as to make it possible to use multiple protocols and
multiple data structures for public key info, so as to avoid the "my
X is better than yours" problem - where X is protocol, data format,
... Whether this is desirable in the long term is another matter,
but it might help to get the ball rolling ?
Toodle pip!
Martin
[1] <URL:http://www.hks.net/cpunks/cpunks-24/>