What can you say and what does it mean?

This paper examines some of the criteria for a certificate architecture that supports trusted collaboration. Key to this support are: (1) the separation of statements from the actions they engender and (2) the ability to make arbitrary statements. The separation of statement from action enables organizations to set their own policies and therefore control what is authorized in response to a statement. The open ended nature to allow arbitrary statements to be created enables the signer to fully specify her intentions. It should be possible to make these statements arbitrarily precise, by tying the statements to their (semantic) contexts. Furthermore, we argue that it is important not only to support completely formalizable statements but also informal statements as well. We then describe an architecture we are building which meets the above criteria and give examples of its efficacy