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[SPEC] Experimenting with a status code of 12

Stephane Bortzmeyer stephane at sources.org

Fri Feb 19 14:32:29 GMT 2021

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On Thu, Feb 18, 2021 at 08:30:05PM -0700, Mansfield <mansfield at ondollo.com> wrote a message of 291 lines which said:

If a certificate is used to create an account, it becomes a form of
username/password.

Not really. A certificate is basically a public key plus some metadata(identity, signature, expiration date, etc). Certificates aretypically public (with TLS 1.2, they are even sent in clear). It isthe knowledge of the private key that allows client certificates to beused as an authentication tool.