NIST deprecates the Bridge CA Concept

List,

http://www.gcn.com/print/25_9/40506-1.html

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"It's much harder than we thought it would 
be," Burr said. "We've backed the wrong horse any number of times." He said one 
of these wrong horses was the decision to use a bridge certificate authority 
rather than a single central certificate authority to issue and manage digital 
certificates

</GCN.Quote>

Although Mr. Burr indeed 
later endorsed the Bridge concept as a long-term goal, the immediate effect (if 
the US government proceeds as the article described), is that vendors, allies, 
and consultants will back away from this solution.

In the mean-time, 
simpler and cheaper approaches like "gateways", will effectively remove the need 
to ever resurrect the Bridge.   A client-centric Bridge CA concept 
also does not support the design of integrated organization-to-organization 
workflow applications, something which ought to be the long term goal for the US 
government IT.  What security principles they use (as long as they work), 
should be of secondary importance.

Regarding analysis of processes, there 
is actually quite a collection of papers to read, and very few of them show a 
need for a trust model where an employee/associate of one organization needs to 
be fully trusted/qualified by another organization.  A model where the 
"organization" becomes the primary entity (like in Shibboleth/SAML), scales 
better, allows arbitrary employee privacy protection, and probably works 
entirely satisfactory in 99 cases of 100.  Using a 2-layer credential and 
signature structure (gateway PKI + local PKI), you can easily take the last 
percent as well.

It should be like VeriSign's Phillip Hallam-Baker 
said on the PKI Workshop 2006:

"If I send a message from my company, I 
expect my company to secure it".

If it had not been for the Bridge, we 
could actually have had secure e-mail today.  Not only within isolated 
islands, but for every Netizen.

Sincerely
Anders 
Rundgren
Principal Engineer
RSA Security