X.509 Certificate

Full Name or Meme

A structure defined by the CCITT (now ITU) that binds a Subject name to a public key and a set of Attributes.

Context

• Up until the 1970's the Postal and Telecommunications Agencies of the world governments just knew that they were responsible for assigning names and numbers to everything on the planet.
• At that time only a few of the world governments, like the US, had placed the responsibilities for such naming and numbering in private hands.
• Still in the US AT&T acted with the impunity of a government agency, until they were challenged in court by companies like MCI.
• With all of the arrogance of a government body, the ITU's Committee on Communications and International Telephone and Telegraph (CCITT), decided to specifiy the structure of email and the corresponding security.

Problems

The result was an exceeding ugly encoding of everything they touched, most of which has faded into history, except the X.509 certificate structure.

Solutions

• The content of a Web Site certification is reasonably well defined