Internet2 PKI Labs - Draft Research Agenda

Version 0.9

1. General Issues
   1. Addressing problems of scale for PKIs in large communities of interest composed of relatively autonomous entities, like Internet2 itself.
   2. Alternatives to CRLs. A number of alternatives to CRLs are being developed to guarantee the currency of certificate data. The relative advantages of these approaches are not understood, nor are testbeds available to evaluate these options.
   3. Interoperability between systems and infrastructures based on various approaches (PKIX, Kerberos, PGP, SPKI, GSS-API; different public key algorithms; platforms; etc.)
   4. Optimizing architectures and infrastructures for different constraints: simplicity, security, privacy, cost, performance, connectivity, availability, legal environment, various application scenarios. E.g. tracking down referral chains between certificates can be slow.
   5. Defining and measuring metrics for PKI: performance, availability, etc.
   6. Usability and human interface analysis. Human interface techniques for dealing with issues like multiple valid certificate chains which have differing policy implications or confidence levels.
   7. Methods to support the simple and secure installation, maintenance and update of trusted CA root certificates and security policies to clients, and facilitating (when appropriate) the sharing of security-related settings across various end-user devices.
   8. Securely moving expensive or complex client-side processing or connectivity to nearby computing and networking resources (certificate chain resolvers, LDAP referral chaining, etc.)
   9. Identification and/or mitigation of security threats specific to PKI-related protocols and services: flaws in relevant protocols, Denial of Service attacks, compromise of CA private keys, audits of code, certificates and policies, etc.
   10. Harmonizing approaches to Single Sign On with PKI systems.
   11. Minimizing the privacy risks that can accompany wider use of authentication.
   12. Maintaining access to secret keys and the data they protect despite forgetful or unavailable key owners.
   13. Gradated approaches to authorization and authentication, in which the level of certainty is communicated to the application so it can be balanced against the cost of an error, and additional evidence can be requested.
   14. Name-space management issues.
2. Authorization Infrastructures
   1. Public Key Infrastructures based on attribute certificates vs. identity certificates.
   2. Approaches to delegation of authority.
3. Policy Issues
   1. Use of policy objects with certificates, and the management (construction and validation) of complex trust chains (varying over context and time). Also, the ability to do effective policy mapping between disparate PKI domains issuing certificates under different certificate policies.
   2. Policy definition languages.
   3. Automated generation of certificates, incorporating information from existing sources and user input according to a policy.
4. Related Directory Services
   1. Development of uniform access control model for access to directories in general, and to specific information within those directories (granular control).
   2. Analysis of the performance of chaining versus referrals for the finding and processing of trust paths.
5. Open Source Solutions
   1. New libraries, modules, plug-ins, applications, user interfaces, etc., in open source code suited to a variety of platforms and languages.
   2. APIs and configuration systems to hide the complexity and diversity of security infrastructures from the applications programmer.
   3. Prototype implementations of common applications (inter-library loan, research collaboration, shared access to preprint servers, etc.)