Towards an Infrastructure for Authorization Position Paper

In recent years, there has been a great deal of debate about whether a large-scale \publickey infrastructure" is needed for electronic commerce and, if so, whether the technical di culty of building and deploying such an infrastructure will impede the growth of electronic commerce. We argue here that much of the controversy is attributable to the fact that the term \public-key infrastructure" has not been clearly and correctly de ned. We explain why the informal de nition most often associated with the term, i.e., that of a global mapping between users' identities and public keys, is not the right de nition for electronic commerce and hence that whether such a mapping can and will be built and deployed with available resources is not an especially pressing question. Finally, we describe an alternative type of infrastructural development that we believe really would enable electronic commerce.