ABSTRACT
Public key infrastructures (PKIs) are gaining importance in today’s IT environment for managing certificates and keys. Much effort is devoted to understanding and standardizing protocols to manage this infrastructure. However, it is equally recognized that the quality and trustworthiness of certificates depend to a large extent on the practices and procedures a certification authority applies when issuing certificates. These procedures are documented in so-called Certification Practice Statements (CPS), which are generally text-based documents and therefore cannot be processed by machines. This chapter describes a framework, based on knowledge representation techniques, which addresses this situation. Subsumption will be used to compare and query CPS. Based on a case study of modeling a real CPS, some features of this framework will be described. An outlook of future work conclude this chapter.
