Question about Geospatial data integrity

[Venkatesh Raghavan]

Hi All,

Is anybody on OSGEO aware of any Open Source initiative to
implement Public Key Infrastructure for Geospatial
data.

I heard some talks recently on PKI related issues
(Privacy, Authentication, Integrity, Non-Repudiation;
PAIN) for spatial data. I think Authentication mechanisms
have be incorporated in some OSGEO web-gis clients such as Mapbender
etc.

How about initiatives to check data integrity and
traceability of spatial data. Although my knowledge on these matter
is rudimentary, I think it would not be very difficult
to develop some kind of mechanism to check the
integrity of spatial data (shape file or geotiff)
using MD5 hash function. Such integrity check are
often used sofware packages (RPM) where the installer
automatically does an mdsum check. Perhaps similar
checks for spatial data can also be introduced in
Web GIS and Desktop GIS Clients.

Any leads, comments, suggestion?

Regards

Venka