This is the first informal announcement of libspki. SPKI, the Simple Public Key Infrastructure, is a sane way of using certificates. The original design is by Carl Ellison and Ron Rivest. The emphasis, at least from my point of view, is on association of authorization to keys (in contrast to X.509, which tries to bind X.500 names to keys), and on delegation of some or all of one's authorization. For some background, read RFC 2693.

I think the primary applications where SPKI would be useful is in authentication (like public key ssh login, as well as host authentication), access control for various network servers, perhaps also peer-to-peer servers, etc.

I've been working on an SPKI library from time to time since November last year. As the name promises, it *is* pretty simple. I have the most important features in place and it's still less than 7000 lines. For an example of what the objects look like, see the delegation testcase, URL: http://cvs.lysator.liu.se/viewcvs/viewcvs.cgi/lsh/src/spki/testsuite/delegate-test?rev=HEAD&cvsroot=lsh&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

The purpose if this announcement is to find out if there are any other people in the community who are interested in SPKI. I'm not in a desperate need for coding help, but I could really use feedback on the code and functionality: If the interfaces are reasonable or need generalization, which of the missing features are important, how to organize the directory of SPKI-related information, which parts are in the most need of documentation, etc.

To me, SPKI seems like the obvious way to go whenever one needs public keys, and has the luxury of not having to be backwards compatible with X.509. (Actually, SPKI is designed so that it *can* interoperate with alien PKI stuff, such as X.509, but I'm not going to write that code any time soon).

There's no polished distribution, so the easiest way to try out libspki is to pull the latest lsh from cvs.

For further pointers and instructions, see URL: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/libspki.

Please let me know what you think about it.

Happy hacking, /Niels