At 5:36 PM +0000 10/19/97, Lutz Donnerhacke wrote:
Abstract
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a software product combining strong asymmetric
and symmetric cryptography for secure e-mail communication. These services
include confidentiality, key management, digital signature, and time
stamping. This document specifies the message exchange format used in
version 2.6.3x and 5.x of PGP.
Wow! Lutz, I'm impressed. While some have been arguing about numerous
topics, you've taken the bull by the horns and produced a first cut at one
of the documents we need to concentrate on. This is quite a piece of work.
I've been reading thru the comments on Lutz's posting. There have been
numerous good suggestions. By all means continue your reading of this
document and attempts to implement it.
In order to make sure we're continuing to make progress, and that the
progress gets reflected up through the rest of the IETF, it's time to set
some ground rules.
Lutz's work mirrors some of the work that Jon Callas and Rod Thayer have
also done. I've asked the three of them to collaborate on a single version
of this document to be submitted as an Internet-Draft. That will be the
basis of work on message formats going forward. I expect the reconcilation
into a single document and it's submission as an I-D to be completed by the
end of October.
That will leave 3 more weeks for a 2nd revision to be posted in time for
consideration for our meeting in Washington DC in Dec. It is possible we
will still be discussing the first official I-D by Nov 21. In any event, I
expect to use a good portion of our meeting in Dec discussing the message
format document that results from the collaboration of Jon, Lutz, and Rod,
and the comments it elicits from all of you.
In addition to the IETF document sites, our working group has an additional
archive at imc.org. That archive contains copies of the current documents
that "belong" to our working group that have been reviewed and posted by
the IETF rfc editor, as well as an archive of all the messages to this list.
I'll talk about PGP/MIME in a different message.
Is everybody with me so far?
best,
john w noerenberg, ii
jwn2(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com
pager: jwn2(_at_)pager(_dot_)qualcomm(_dot_)com
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"A beautiful idea has a much greater chance of being a correct idea
than an ugly one."
-- Roger Penrose, "The Emperor's New Mind", 1989
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