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Lutz Donnerhacke | 6 Mar 1998 15:31
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S/MIME wins

http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?INW19980216S0024

"(...)
Among U.S. campanies, momentum is building in favor of S/MIME. Both
Microsoft and Netscape Communications have S/MIME clients and Lotus and
Novell have announced support for S/MIME. Only Qualcomm Inc., maker of
the Eudora E-mail client, supports PGP/MIME.

At the IETF, the S/MIME working group is about one month away from
completing its work on the specification. The OpenPGP group, however, has
not updated the draft of its specification since October, when group
members identified a number of problems. Both groups had agreed to submit
their final drafts next month, but it is unlikely the PGP group can
finish.

If that is the case, S/MIME by default could emerge as the dominant standard."
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Paul Hoffman / IMC | 6 Mar 1998 17:49
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Re: S/MIME wins

>If that is the case, S/MIME by default could emerge as the dominant
standard."

And, if that is not the case, OpenPGP has the chance to "win". However, it
will take more work than is being shown in this Working Group. It's been
three months since the DC IETF meeting, but we haven't seen a second draft
of the main spec or the first draft of the MIME integration spec.

>From the discussion on this list, it looks like there are still thorny
issues left in the main draft. The only way to for OpenPGP to finish is for
it to keep going.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium
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Jon Callas | 6 Mar 1998 19:18
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Re: S/MIME wins

At 1:07 PM -0400 3/6/98, William H. Geiger III wrote:

   Well who is working on these drafts? where are they? And what needs to be
   done to get them finished??

   I started making phone calls yesterday trying to find out the status of
   things but could not reach anyone. I have a lot of time and effort tied up
   in this too see it get pissed away before the race even gets started.

The next draft of formats is almost done. It'll be out next week.

	Jon

-----
Jon Callas                                  jon <at> pgp.com
CTO, Total Network Security                 4200 Bohannon Drive
Network Associates, Inc.                    Menlo Park, CA 94025
(650) 473-2860
Fingerprints: D1EC 3C51 FCB1 67F8 4345 4A04 7DF9 C2E6 F129 27A9 (DSS)
              665B 797F 37D1 C240 53AC 6D87 3A60 4628           (RSA)
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William H. Geiger III | 6 Mar 1998 18:07

Re: S/MIME wins


In <199803061654.IAA23337 <at> mail.proper.com>, on 03/06/98 
   at 08:49 AM, Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman <at> imc.org> said:

>>If that is the case, S/MIME by default could emerge as the dominant
>standard."

>And, if that is not the case, OpenPGP has the chance to "win". However,
>it will take more work than is being shown in this Working Group. It's
>been three months since the DC IETF meeting, but we haven't seen a second
>draft of the main spec or the first draft of the MIME integration spec.

>>From the discussion on this list, it looks like there are still thorny
>issues left in the main draft. The only way to for OpenPGP to finish is
>for it to keep going.

Well who is working on these drafts? where are they? And what needs to be
done to get them finished??

I started making phone calls yesterday trying to find out the status of
things but could not reach anyone. I have a lot of time and effort tied up
in this too see it get pissed away before the race even gets started.

--

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
William H. Geiger III  http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
(Continue reading)

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Lutz Donnerhacke | 6 Mar 1998 21:30
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Re: S/MIME wins

* William H. Geiger III wrote:
>Well who is working on these drafts? where are they? And what needs to be
>done to get them finished??

Wonderful questions. Last month I drove through Germany to get money for
plugin development for the reference implementation. Now I'm back.
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Lutz Donnerhacke | 6 Mar 1998 21:29
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Re: S/MIME wins

* Jon Callas wrote:
>The next draft of formats is almost done. It'll be out next week.

If I still be on the editor list, I'd like to read and comment it first. thx.,

The formal draft is on the way. Expect end of April.
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Paul Hoffman / IMC | 6 Mar 1998 21:30
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Re: S/MIME wins

At 08:29 PM 3/6/98 +0000, Lutz Donnerhacke wrote:
>The formal draft is on the way. Expect end of April.

Er, "the formal draft"? What's that?

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium
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Jon Callas | 6 Mar 1998 23:51
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Algorithm questions

I have a couple of questions about the algorithms specified in the next draft:

Elliptic Curve: I've added identifiers for EC-encryption and ECDSA. Is this
enough?

X9.42: Should we add it?

ROT-N: The reason this is here is to give an algorithm that all the proper
transforms can be done on -- IV construction, encoding engines, etc. -- but
won't be export controlled in a reference implementation. This would allow
an international team of people to build and test the reference
implementation. However, it has to be defined in more detail than that to
really be interoperable. I think it's both useful and amusing, but I'm not
so committed to it that I've actually done the work to spec it out. Someone
who believes in having it needs to write up the details. If no one does so,
I'm removing it.

Haval: Similar to the above, someone who wants Haval has to decide how many
rounds and the length. In Washington, we agreed that it should be at least
as strong as SHA-1 or RIPEMD160. Someone with an opinion should state it,
or it goes.

Blowfish: Ditto. We need the variant specified.

	Jon
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Andrew Bromage | 7 Mar 1998 01:05
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Re: S/MIME wins

G'day all.

Lutz Donnerhacke wrote:

> "(...)
> Among U.S. campanies, momentum is building in favor of S/MIME. Both
> Microsoft and Netscape Communications have S/MIME clients and Lotus and
> Novell have announced support for S/MIME. Only Qualcomm Inc., maker of
> the Eudora E-mail client, supports PGP/MIME.

Let's not forget that if we move quickly, there could well be at least
one other PGP/MIME client: Netscape Communicator 5.x.  The timing of
the source release could be fortuitous for the Open PGP community.

> Both groups had agreed to submit
> their final drafts next month, but it is unlikely the PGP group can
> finish.

I think that a worse outcome than this working group not finishing on
time is this working group engaging in a firefighting effort and ending
up with an inferior standard.

Also ask yourself if anyone would go to the same effort over S/MIME as
the PGPi group did with PGP 5.0 (with scanning and proofreading etc).
This suggests that PGP/MIME may well be the only interoperable strong
crypto system for your email available world-wide, which has to be a
point in its favour.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage
(Continue reading)

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Werner Koch | 7 Mar 1998 11:22
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Re: Algorithm questions

Jon Callas <jon <at> pgp.com> writes:

> Blowfish: Ditto. We need the variant specified.

Yes, please.

--

-- 
Werner

                                       finger gcrypt <at> ftp.guug.de for GNUPG key
              fingerprint = 8489 6CD0 1851 0E33 45DA  CD67 036F 11B8 FF3E AA0B
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Gmane