Abstract. PKIs are complex distributed systems that are responsible for giving users enough information to make reasonable trust judgments about one another. Since the currencies of PKI are trust and certificates, users who make trust decisions (often called relying parties) must do so using only some initial trust beliefs about the PKI and some pile of certificates (and other assertions) they received from the PKI. Given a certificate, a relying party needs to conclude that the keyholder described by the certificate actually possesses the properties described by the certificate. In this paper, we present a calculus that allows relying parties to make such trust judgements. Our calculus extends Maurer's deterministic model, and is focused on real world issues such as time, revocation, delegation, and heterogeneous certificate formats. We then demonstrate how our calculus can be used to reason about numerous situations that arise in practice.
The security-mediated approach to PKI offers several advantages, such as instant revocation and compatibility with standard RSA tools. In this paper, we present a design and prototype that addresses its trust and scalability problems. We use trusted computing platforms linked with peer-to-peer networks to create a network of trustworthy mediators and improve availability. We use threshold cryptography to build a back-up and migration technique which allows recovery from a mediator crashing while also avoiding having all mediators share all secrets. We then use strong forward secrecy with this migration, to mitigate the damage should a crashed mediator actually be compromised.
Abstract. The Green Grid is an ambitious project to create a shared high performance computing infrastructure for science and engineering at Dartmouth College. The Green Grid was created with the support of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences to promote collaborative computing for the entire Dartmouth community. We will share our design for building campus grids and experiences in Grid-enabling applications from several academic departments.
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