From: Matt Blaze <mab@research.att.com>
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 1996 09:13:47 +0800
To: "Frank O'Dwyer" <fod@brd.ie>
Subject: Re: "trust management" vs. "certified identity"
In-Reply-To: <01BADC99.C7034FE0@dialup-169.dublin.iol.ie>
Message-ID: <199601070103.UAA13065@nsa.tempo.att.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


...
>That's not to say that the certification approach can't be general, though.  
>It occurred to me that a very general certificate format would
>simply be to sign some assertions (predicates), and then 
>feed all available signed predicates plus some axioms (the analogue 
>of root keys) into a theorem prover.  Sounds slow though.  More 
>practically perhaps, you could sign some kind of (safe) interpreted code, 
>and have the verifier execute it on some initial variable set to come up with
>some access decision.  
>
Yes.  That's pretty much PolicyMaker in a nutshell.

-matt