NDN certificate management protocol (NDNCERT) enables automatic certificate management in NDN. In Named Data Networking (NDN), every entity should have corresponding identity (namespace) and the corresponding certificate for this namespace. Moreover, entities need simple mechanisms to manage sub-identities and their certificates. NDNCERT provides flexible mechanisms to request certificate from a certificate authority(CA) and, as soon as certificate is obtained, mechanisms to issue and manage certificates in the designated namespace. Note that NDNCERT does not impose any specific trust model or trust anchors. While the primary use case of the developed protocol is to manage NDN testbed certificates, it can be used with any other set of global and local trust anchors.
This specification provides details and packet formats to request certificates, create certificates after one of the validation mechanism, and how the issued certificate is retrieved by the original requester.