Preface:

Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the SCC Mirror Committee (SMC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T).

At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 9594-8:2020 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA Group will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC.

This Standard has been formally approved, without modification, by the Technical Committee and has been developed in compliance with Standards Council of Canada requirements for National Standards of Canada. It has been published as a National Standard of Canada by CSA Group.

Scope:

This Recommendation | International Standard addresses some of the security requirements in the areas of authentication and other security services through the provision of a set of frameworks upon which full services can be based. Specifically, this Recommendation | International Standard defines frameworks for:

• public-key certificates; and
• attribute certificates.

The public-key certificate framework defined in this Recommendation | International Standard specifies the information objects and data types for a public-key infrastructure (PKI), including public-key certificates, certificate revocation lists (CRLs), trust broker and authorization and validation lists (AVLs). The attribute certificate framework specifies the information objects and data types for a privilege management infrastructure (PMI), including attribute certificates, and attribute certificate revocation lists (ACRLs). This Recommendation | International Standard also provides the framework for issuing, managing, using and revoking certificates. An extensibility mechanism is included in the defined formats for both certificate types and for all revocation list schemes. This Recommendation | International Standard also includes a set of extensions, which is expected to be generally useful across a number of applications of PKI and PMI. The schema components (including object classes, attribute types and matching rules) for storing PKI and PMI information in a directory, are included in this Recommendation | International Standard.

This Recommendation | International Standard specifies the framework for strong authentication, involving credentials formed using cryptographic techniques. It is not intended to establish this as a general framework for authentication, but it can be of general use for applications which consider these techniques adequate.

Authentication (and other security services) can only be provided within the context of a defined security policy. It is a matter for users of an application to define their own security policy.