CCOW 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:

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

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