Monday, February 21, 2005

I'm working towards two major implementations this week.

First, I need to come up with a good model for service-based public key distribution, registration and revocation. We need to get something that can help us manage a fairly dynamic PKI environment as efficiently as possible. Another challenge is to be sure that the implementation supports applications written in both .NET's C# and Java. As a start, I believe that the XML Key Management Specification (XKMS) is the right place to begin my research. The specification appears to support the major functional requirements that we have for the system, and I was even able to find some help getting a .NET web service version of the protocol running in this article: Implementing XML Key Management Services Using ASP.NET.

Second, I need to come up with an approach to handle SAML-like (if not actually SAML) assertions within that same environment. I don't have quite as much research completed on this task, but I will be posting my thoughts and findings as I get around to this implementation.