RFC - 2560

X.509 Internet Public Key Infrastructure Online Certificate Status Protocol - OCSP

Original:	ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2560.txt
Authors:	M. Myers [VeriSign], R. Ankney [CertCo], A. Malpani [ValiCert], S. Galperin [My CFO], C. Adams [Entrust Technologies]
Date:	June 1999
Category:	Proposed Standard

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Referred by:	28 RFC
Refers to:	4 RFC

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Status

This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

This document specifies a protocol useful in determining the current status of a digital certificate without requiring CRLs. Additional mechanisms addressing PKIX operational requirements are specified in separate documents.

An overview of the protocol is provided in section 2. Functional requirements are specified in section 4. Details of the protocol are in section 5. We cover security issues with the protocol in section 6. Appendix A defines OCSP over HTTP, appendix B accumulates ASN.1 syntactic elements and appendix C specifies the mime types for the messages.

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document (in uppercase, as shown) are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

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