sean.mullan@ireland 2000-03-03

The Certification Path API is a Java API for building and verifying
certification paths (also known as certificate chains). A certification
path is an ordered list of certificates. If a certification path meets
certain validation rules, it may be used to securely establish the mapping
of a public key to a name.

A reference implementation (currently under development) will
provide a PKIX-compliant (RFC 2459) implementation, including support
for fetching certificates from an LDAP directory via JNDI and checking
revocation using CRLs. This API will make life easier for code that
needs to build or verify certification paths (such as SSL code, signed
code verification, S/MIME code, etc.).

See http://java.sun.com/aboutJava/communityprocess/jsr/jsr_055_certp.html
for more information.