20032009 Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved. The contents of this file are subject to the Erlang Public License, Version 1.1, (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You should have received a copy of the Erlang Public License along with this software. If not, it can be retrieved online at http://www.erlang.org/. Software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" basis, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing rights and limitations under the License. PKIX Certificates UAB/F/P Peter Högfeldt 2003-06-09 A pkix_certs.sgml
Introduction to Certificates

Outline:

SSL/TLS protocol - server must have certificate - -what the the server sends to the client - client may verify the server - server may ask client for certificate - what the client sends to the server - server may then verify the client - verification - certificate chains - root certificates - public keys - key agreement - purpose of certificate - main contents of certificate - contents have increased as time went by - common file formats for certificates. private keys - password protection - key generation - file formats. ssl_pkix and alternate decodings. Attribute Certificates (not used by SSL). Certificate requests - certificate authorities - signing of certificates - certificate revocation lists. standards: ASN.1, X.509, X.520, PKIX, PKCS, PEM. incompatibilities between standards (X.509-1997 vs old) - the ASN.1 problem of ANY, BIT STRING and OCTET STRING - the module ssl_pkix. test suites: NIST Warnings: *creation* of trusted certificate (OpenSSL). Erlang SSL and certificates The need for seeding the random generator. See also John S. Denker: High-Entropy Symbol Generator (http://www.monmouth.com/~jsd). links to standards and documents. Books (Rescorla). ASN.1 crash course. Nagel algorithm.

For an introduction to ASN.1 see ASN.1 Information Site.