Abstract
SPKI/SDSI is a fram work for expressing naming and eauthorization issues that aris in a distributed-computing environment. In this paper, we establish a connection between SPKI/SDSI and a formalism known as pushdown systems (PDSs). We show that the SPKI/SDSI-to-PDS connection provides a framework for formalizing a variety of certificate-analysis problems. Moreover, the connection has computational significance: Many analysis problems can be solved efficiently (i.e., in time polynomial in the size of the certificate set) using existing algorithms for model checking pushdown systems.