Authenticated Dictionaries for Fresh Attribute Credentials

We describe several schemes for efficiently populating an authenticated dictionary with fresh credentials. The thrust of this effort is directed at allowing for many data authors, called sources, to collectively publish information to a common repository, which is then distributed throughout a network to allow for authenticated queries on this information. Authors are assured of their contributions being added to the repository based on cryptographic receipts that the repository returns after performing the updates sent by an author. While our motivation here is the dissemination of credential status data from multiple credential issuers, applications of this technology also include time stamping of documents, document version integrity control, and multiple-CA certificate revocation management, to name just a few.