Versioned Policy Collections for Traceable Certificate Issuance
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Solution Overview
Problem
Certificate authorities face challenges in ensuring compliance with evolving policy constraints during certificate issuance, leading to mis-issuance events that damage their reputation, due to the varying frequencies and impacts of policy changes.
Innovation Solution
Implementing versioned policy collections and cryptographic assertions to manage policy changes, ensuring that certificate issuance processes adhere to the specified policies, and providing traceability and integrity through cryptographic verification.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If policy constraints are updated frequently to reflect evolving security requirements, then security compliance is improved, but system stability and issuance reliability deteriorate due to varying frequencies and impacts of policy changes
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the policy framework into versioned policy collections, where each collection represents a specific point-in-time snapshot of policy constraints. This segmentation allows the system to maintain multiple policy versions simultaneously, enabling both stability (by referencing fixed versions) and adaptability (by updating individual versions) without conflict.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements preliminary action by establishing policy collections at specific point-in-time moments before changes occur. Each policy collection is pre-defined with complete policy constraints, and certificate issuance processes are bound to specific versions in advance. This preliminary versioning prevents mid-process policy changes from causing instability while still allowing future adaptability through new version creation.
2Manufacturing precision
If cryptographic assertions are implemented to verify policy compliance, then issuance accuracy is improved, but system complexity increases due to additional verification mechanisms
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements feedback through cryptographic assertions that provide verifiable proof of policy compliance. Each assertion contains cryptographic evidence linking the certificate issuance to specific policy constraints, creating a feedback loop that confirms accuracy. This feedback mechanism ensures issuance precision while maintaining manageable complexity through standardized assertion formats.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces cryptographic assertions as intermediary elements that mediate between the certificate issuance process and policy verification. These assertions serve as self-contained verification objects that encapsulate compliance evidence, allowing independent validation without requiring complex real-time verification systems. The intermediary assertions simplify the overall system architecture by decoupling issuance from verification.
Data Source
AI summary
A public certificate authority (CA) manages versioned sets of a collection of individual policies that serve as a basis for how a certificate issuance workflow processes certificate requests, and tracks the particular set of policies applied by the issuance workflow process to produce a particular certificate. For example, the public CA responds to a certificate request by identifying a current policy collection version, and performing a certificate issuance workflow in accordance with the set of individual policy versions specified by the current policy collection version. If the requested certificate is correctly produced, the public CA publishes the certificate and records, to a tracking data store, an identifier of the certificate and the policy collection version used in performance of the issuance workflow. The records may be used to respond to audit requests, matching certificates to the policy collection version used in performance of the issuance workflow for that certificate.