[Webfunds-devel] What does [cert] mean?

Wed, 23 Aug 2000 21:30:43 -0400

"Jeroen C. van Gelderen" wrote:
> 
> After all the discussion about brackets vs. parentheses
> something entirely different: what does [cert] mean?
> 
> The term 'cert' sounds a bit ambiguous to me, it could
> mean anything from certificate to CA. We might want to
> spell out what we mean here in the interest of not leaving
> enough rope for the lawyers to hang us with. After all,
> bytes are cheap these days and RSI no longer is a concern
> with the iang-keygen-script.

> But let's fist answer the question: what exactly does [cert]
> mean?

It means certification.  That was the word we used to use,
and it got shortened to cert when we got sick of typing out
the word.

Certification means specifically that this is the key that
an entity or person uses to certify its other keys for
identified purposes.

It doesn't mean certificate, and this is definately an
unfortunate overloading that I never saw, too many trees
in the forest.

It specifically doesn't mean CA in the sense that the CA
signs others' keys;  in the industry sense as promoted by
Verisign and others.  If you wanted to do this business,
within the model herein discusses, you'd create a CA key
and sign that with your certification key.

So, in retrospect, shortening it to [cert] may have been
a bad idea, I think I'll deprecate that and we can go back
to [certification].  Now, the question then arises, is
certification as a description adequate to pass the ambiguity
filter, or indeed any other sniff-level test?

-- 
iang