BGP Security and PKI Hierarchies (was: Re: Wifi Security)

Thu Nov 24 01:54:44 UTC 2005

On Thu, 24 Nov 2005, George Michaelson wrote:

> According to what I understand, there have to be two certificates per
> entity:
>
> 	one is the CA-bit enabled certificate, used to sign subsidiary
> 	certificates about resources being given to other people to use.
>
> 	the other is a self-signed NON-CA certificate, used to sign
> 	route assertions you are attesting to yourself: you make this
> 	cert using the CA cert you get from your logical parent.

So how is the 2nd one different from the first? In both cases you give
permission to certain use of a resource under your control. If you look
at it the only difference is:
  - To authorize reallocations you sign request based on another entity's
    ORG object,
  - To authorize announcement you sign request based on another entity's
    ASN object (can be your own ASN).

But in general ASN object is also basically a type of ORG with extra data
(i.e. ASN# and ASN name), so I don't see why you can't use one cert (if
somebody does not list AS# for their org I guess they can't route 
independently).

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net