Method and system to authorize and assign digital certificates without loss of privacy, and/or to enhance privacy key selection

Abstract

A method and system for public key infrastructure key and certificate management provides anonymity to certificate holders and protects the privacy of certificate holders from the compromise of a certificate authority. Functional separation is provided in the authorization of a certificate request and the assignment of certificates and key pairs. The authorizing certificate authority approves or denies each certificate request from a requestor whose identity is not made available to the assigning certificate authority. The assigning certificate authority, upon approval from the authorizing certificate authority, issues one or more certificates and optionally generates and provides the associated key pairs to the requester without disclosing these certificates and key pairs to the authorizing certificate authority. In another aspect, a distributed method is disclosed that allows individual nodes and/or units in a network to select certificates for broadcasting messages to a community of interest with a non-unique key.