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Trust Anchor Management Protocol (TAMP)



NSA is reportedly developing a protocol for trust anchor management, possibly intended to become a PKIX WG item.
 
Reference: http://cryptome.org/poet-docs.htm item 44.
 
Although there seems to be no public data available, I believe that the concept of maintaining trust anchor stores through a protocol would if applied to networking, be similar to a protocol for maintaining "hosts" files rather than using DNS.  When trust anchor handling needs automation, a more universal approach is to off-load validation using a protocol like SCVP.  In fact, SCVP principles are already widely deployed for in-house systems where trust management is performed in one place.  Off-loaded validation also copes with EE-certificate revocation, policy filtering, and similar things that appear to be out of scope for a trust-anchor-focused system.
 
TAMP have one advantage of SCVP and that is that it may work in off-scenarios as well.  Given the fact that billions of people rely on on-line services, the off-line argument seems pretty week.
 
Just my 2 cents
 
Anders Rundgren