Classifying Public Key Certificates

In spite of the fact that there are several companies that (try to) sell public key certificates, there is still no unified or standardized classification scheme that can be used to compare and put into perspective the various offerings. In this paper, we try to start filling this gap and propose a four-dimensional scheme that can be used to uniformly describe and classify public key certificates. The scheme distinguishes between (i) who owns a certificate, (ii) how the certificate owner is registered, (iii) on what medium the certificate (or the private key, respectively) is stored, and (iv) what type of functionality the certificate is intended to be used for. We think that using these or similar criteria to define and come up with unified or even standardized classes of public key certificate is useful and urgently needed in practice.