Trust management in the public-key infrastructure

Public-key infrastructure manages trust in exchanges conducted by email, over the web and by other electronic means. The principal elements used for maintaining that trust are the contents of the certificates and the security safeguards in effect in the environments of the various parties involved. These two elements are derived by a risk management procedure from the business purpose of the exchanges, as captured in the certificate policy. In this paper we describe a high-level procedure for deriving certificate contents and security safeguards from the business purpose associated with the keys, by way of a certificate policy and security policies for each of the subscriber, relying party and authority environments.