Re: registration authorities

[Stephen Kent <kent@xxxxxxx>]

At 2:24 PM +0000 12/30/04, David Chadwick wrote:
> Steve
>
> a CA is a Certification Authority, and not necessarily a 
> Registration Authority. Conceptually and operationally they are 
> different and therefore there should always be an allowance for this.
>
> regards
>
> David

David,

I certainly agree with the distinction, but other than in the context 
of qualified certs, X.509 does not make explicit provision for 
inclusion of RA info, probably since it is not used in the cert 
validation process.

Peter Sylvester noted shortly after my message, a CA is certainly 
free to out an RA name in a cert, bnut I assumed he meant that one 
could include the qc extension and put the RA name in it. In that 
case the cert looks like a QC cert, syntactically, hence my comment.

Steve