Affiliations: Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin, 1210 W. Dayton Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA. E-mail: jha@cs.wisc.edu, reps@cs.wisc.edu
Note: [*] This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CCR-9619219, by the Office of Naval Research under contracts N00014-01-1-0796 and N00014-01-1-0708, and by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes, notwithstanding any copyright notices affixed thereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors, and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the above government agencies or the U.S. Government.
Abstract: SPKI/SDSI is a framework for expressing naming and authorization issues that arise in a distributed-computing environment. In this paper, we establish a connection between SPKI/SDSI and a formalism known as pushdown systems (PDSs). We show that the SPKI/SDSI-to-PDS connection provides a framework for formalizing a variety of certificate-analysis problems. Moreover, the connection has computational significance: many analysis problems can be solved efficiently (i.e., in time polynomial in the size of the certificate set) using existing algorithms for model checking pushdown systems.
