As metadata providers increase in number and diversity, and additional contexts for metadata use are identified, issues of trust, provenance and identity gain in relevance. Use of a public-key infrastructure (PKI) is discussed for digital signature of metadata records, providing evidence of the identity of the signer and the authenticity of the information within the record. Two methods are sug...

Much work is going into securing the public key infrastructure (PKI). Various models for trust exist; Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and the Progressive-Constraint Trust model are examples.[3] These models describe how to protect and ensure the interrelationships of their certificate based structures; however, vulnerabilities may arise when structures based on certificate authorities (CAs) are invol...