Is PGP X.509's secret weapon?

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Fri Apr 10 06:26:10 EDT 2009


I was just reading through the WiMAX PKI documentation [0]... this uses PGP to 
issue device and server X.509 certificates for use in WiMAX networks:

  "Name" is an identifying name for the recipient that will be used as an
  authenticated identity by the CA signing system.  This is the identifier by
  which the CA system identifies which PGP key is used to encrypt the
  deliverable certificates and keys.

  The WIMAX Forum will notify Authorized Users of the completion of their
  order via email. Certificates will be delivered as an encrypted PGP archive.
  The private key of the Authorized User's PGP key is required to decrypt it.

There's nothing technically wrong with this, it just kinda says it all for 
X.509 that you need to use PGP to get it going.  I can just see PGP Corp's new 
marketing slogan: "PGP: Making X.509 possible".

(Jon, if you guys print shirts with something like this on it, I want one :-).

Peter.

[0] "WiMAX Certificate Authority Users Overview", WiMAX Forum, 2008(?).

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