Traditional Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) have not lived up to their promise because there are too many ways to define PKIs, too many cryptographic primitives to build them with, and too many administrative domains with incompatible roots of trust. Alpaca is an authentication and authorization framework that embraces PKI diversity by enabling one PKI to plug another PKI's credentials and cryptographic algorithms, allowing users of the latter to authenticate themselves to services using the former using their existing, unmodified certificates. Alpaca builds on Proof-Carrying Authorization (PCA), expressing a credential as an explicit proof of a logical claim. Alpaca generalizes PCA to express not only delegation policies but also the cryptographic primitives, credential formats, and namespace structures needed to use foreign credentials directly. To achieve this goal, Alpaca introduces a method of creating and naming new principals which behave according to arbitrary rules, a modular approach to logical axioms, and a domain-specific language specialized for reasoning about authentication. We have implemented Alpaca as a Python module that assists applications in generating proofs (e.g., in a client requesting access to a resource), and in verifying those proofs via a compact 800-line TCB (e.g., in a server providing that resource). We present examples demonstrating Alpaca's extensibility in scenarios involving inter-organization PKI interoperability and secure remote PKI upgrade.

We are heading for a device information disaster. Many people already store information on dozens of devices, but are unable to organize and find their scattered information effectively. A given picture might be on a digital camera, a home PC, a laptop, an iPod Photo, or a cell phone. Even knowing a file's location is often not enough, because the relevant device may be on the far side of a firewall or not currently plugged into a PC's USB port. Sharing pictures, documents, or multimedia with family, friends, and colleagues today requires one to upload the information from a portable device to a personal computer and then E-mail it, or copy files via a physical medium such as a USB key.