DIGITAL CERTIFICATE

Public Key Infrastructure1 ("PKI") now permeates the Internet, operating systems such as Microsoft's Windows, and application software such as Microsoft's Outlook. A core component to this infrastructure is a hierarchical trust model, where a third party "binds" a human identity to a data token - a digital certificate. There exists a fundamental flaw in this trust model, and as a result this infrastructure is the proverbial "house of cards". The reasons are several-fold; 1. Current procedures widely in use to establish the validity of this binding are fraught with means to circumvent2; 2. Even if the procedures mentioned above are carefully designed and stringently executed, the "consumer" of the digital certificate3 cannot perform an independent, robust trust decision. Rather, they must choose to accept or decline the third party's (usually a certificate and or registration authority) assertion as to the binding of a true human identity and the data token; 3. Even if the consumer chooses to accept the third party trust assertion, the issue as to whether or not the "bound" entity is the same entity which is involved in the current PKI transaction4 cannot be resolved. A TrueCert, is an x509 version 3 compliant digital certificate5 which is intended to overcome this flaw, by combining PKI and Biometric technologies, facilitating; 1. A more rigorous means of binding a human identity to the digital certificate (data token); 2. Provide a robust, low cost, scalable, easy to use means for the consumer of the digital certificate to perform an independent trust assertion; 3. As in 2 above, but on a per PKI transaction basis - i.e. evaluate every private key operation.