CCOW Certificate Annotation Subject

Certificate Annotation Subject

The Certificate Annotation subject enables applications to share a common certificate for a user. This is an annotation subject that holds a digital certificate for a user identified in the current User identity subject.

The Certificate Annotation subject uses the certificate exchange format defined in PKCS (public key Cryptography standards) #12. The Password privacy mode of PFX (Parallel Framework Extensions) allows the use of either password or pass-phrase based user certificate protection. The user supplies the password or pass-phrase to an application needed to use the certificate. A pass-phrase should protect the certificates maintained in the certificate subject.

Certificate annotation subjects have the following attributes:

Subject Label	"Certificate"
Subject Type	Annotation
Synchronization	Constant
Security	Authentication required to set or get subject
Subject Dependencies	User
Mapping Agent Coupon Value	-5

The Certificate Annotation subject must be changed or cleared each time the User subject changes. Ideally, a user at a site should have only one certificate used by all applications, but that may not be the case for all sites. Site configurable, application specific suffixes added to a certificate item can differentiate certificates. A Certificate-Link-enabled application should be capable of getting and setting items with the appropriate suffix.

Certificate Annotation subjects have the following standard context data items. A Certificate annotation agent should set the value for at least one of the items listed in the following table:

Certificate Subject Annotation Item Name	Meaning	Data Type	Semantic Constraints on Values	Case Sensitivity
Certificate.An.User.Suffix	User's certificate data in a PFX as defined in PKCS#12	XPN	None	No

Certificate annotation agents can optionally set values for the corroborating items listed in the following table:

Certificate Subject Annotation Item Name	Meaning	Data Type	Semantic Constraints on Values	Case Sensitivity
Certificate.An.UserName	User name	XPN	None	No

Examples of Certificate Subject Items are listed in the following table:

Example Item names	Example Item Values
Certificate.An.User	<PFX containing the common certificate for the current user>
Certificate.An.User.MiPACS	<PFX containing a certificate specific to Logician>
Certificate.An.UserName	Jason^King^^^^