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Re: [IETF-PKIX] Key Identifiers



The discussion on Key Identifiers lead me down the following chain of
thought;

If the Key Identifier is useful for building a path, then it would be useful
to be able to query a directory server for certificates containing keys with
a given key identifier.

If directory servers become sufficiently large (for example, the size of the
Altavista search engine) then a lookup of a large number of certificates by
Key Identifier should be possible within a couple of seconds (with many
occurring concurrently).

If the directory server contained 200 million certificates, then a possible
attack would be to generate key sets and then query the directory server for
matches.  This would give someone with a fairly low-spec machine the ability
to search several hundred million keys per second.

Ian Roberts
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