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On Monday 05 August 2002 18:30, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
At 8:49 PM +0200 8/4/02, Jacob Palme wrote:
I am not a security expert and do not understand why.
Possible causes could be:
- Competing standards where unity is needed.
Not true for email. S/MIME has been built into most widely-used MUAs
for many years; almost no one uses it.
Oh, and is that any wonder? S/MIME combines the wonderful properties of
non-interoperability, complexity, too vague standards and overly high
costs. Of course, those properties are not independent of each other:
E.g. the high costs come from interop tests that _any_ company must
beform for itself after choosing a profile.
Non-interoperability comes from the vague standards wording and the
complexity.
There must be a reason why so many PKI projects fail to succeed.
- Too complex and expensive standards.
Complex, yes; expensive, no. But the complexity hasn't prevented them
from being widely deployed with quite good interoperability.
<snip>
If you are talking about S/MIME, I fail to see where "good
interoperability" lies. I think of S/MIME as being like XML: if you
have two apps that claim to understand XML (S/MIME), it will guarantee
you nothing. You need them to use the same DTD (profile) to do anything
useful with it.
Marc
Mutig warf sich die kleine Überwachungskamera zwischen Täter und Opfer!
--Rena Tangens / FoeBuD e.V.
- --
Marc Mutz <mutz(_at_)kde(_dot_)org>
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