Self-Certificate: PKI using Self-Certified Key
Byoungcheon Lee, Kwangjo Kim · 2000
Self-certified key [Gir91, PH97] is a public key which contains the certification information of a CA in the public key itself. It provides implicit authentication for the public key while the certificate-based scheme like X.509 provides explicit authentication. Self-certified key has several advantages over certificate-based scheme, for example, it provides simple non-interactive key renewal mechanism. But one drawback is that it cannot provide explicit authentication for the public key. Any dishonest party can produce a good-looking self-certified key with other's identity, which cannot be distinguished from the real one before any successful communication with the owner occurs. So in a distributed environment like the Internet, it is hard to use self-certified key for real application.