View source for X.509 Certificate

==Full Name or Meme==
A structure defined by the CCITT (now ITU-T) that binds a [[Subject]] name to a public key and a set of [[Attribute]]s.

==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 and naming in [[LDAP]].
*The security at the time was based on the paradigm at the time - the credit card industry and the card revocation lists, which were updated every few weeks and needed to be checked by every merchant for every transaction.

==Solutions==
*At least now the certificates can be checked online and no longer require certificate revocation lists, although the specification still exists.
*The content of a [[Web Site]] certificate is reasonably well defined<ref>DigiCert. ''What extensions and details are included in a SSL certificate?'' https://knowledge.digicert.com/solution/SO18140.html</ref> which makes them still useful for that purpose.
*They can be used in other venues such as a digital assertion of the existence of some credential, like the ability to prescribe drugs, or to sign a digital document as an agent of some real-world entity.
*On the web a new standard has evolved, the [[Json Web Token]].

==References==



[[Category:Glossary]]