| thumbprint \- public key thumbprints |
| Applications in Plan 9 that use public keys for authentication, |
| check the remote side's public key by comparing against |
| thumbprints from a trusted list. |
| The list is maintained by people who set local policies |
| about which servers can be trusted for which applications, |
| thereby playing the role taken by certificate authorities |
| By convention, these lists are stored as files in |
| and protected by normal file system permissions. |
| Such a thumbprint file comprises lines made up of |
| attribute/value pairs of the form |
| The first attribute must be |
| .BI sha1= {hex checksum of binary certificate}. |
| All other attributes are treated as comments. |
| The file may also contain lines of the form |
| For example, a web server might have thumbprint |
| x509 sha1=8fe472d31b360a8303cd29f92bd734813cbd923c cn=*.cs.bell-labs.com |
