Greetings. This follows up on our previous discussion of open issues in the
S/MIME message draft. It appears we are pretty close to done. The new draft
has now been submitted as a new Internet Draft. It is available from
<http://www.imc.org/ietf-smime/draft-dusse-smime-msg> now, and should
appear in the Internet Drafts directory within a few days.
All S/MIME developers should read this draft carefully, since it might be
the last one before we ship it off as final.
The following changes were made between the -03 and -04 revisions of
this draft:
Made small changes to wording about "standards" because this is now
going to be an informational RFC, not a standard. Also added text to
1.2 to make it clear how we are using the MUSTSHOULD RFC.
Updated the references to ASN.1, BER, and DER in 1.3.
In 2.5, changed "handle and display" to "handle" because there is on
UI defined so we can't say how to "display".
In 2.5.1, changed how signing time is used in order to be Year 2000
friendly and to use the same method as PKIX.
Because this won't go on standards track, the registry listed 2.5.2
now only points to the IMC.
In 2.6, changed "RC2 algorithm[RC2]" to "RC2 [RC2] or a compatible
algorithm".
Added 2.6.4 about what to do if sending to multiple recipients whose
encryption capabilities do not overlap. Also emphasized this in
section 5.
Changed many parts of section 3 to remove the discussion of how to
choose between signedData and multipart/signed. Some of this material
was moved to Appendix F.
In 3.1.1, added a sentence about specifying the charset so that the
receiver can figure out the canonicalization better.
In 3.1.2, changed the default transfer encoding to 7BIT if none is
specified.
In 3.1.4, changed the Content-Type of the example from
application/willy-waggle to image/jpeg.
In 3.2.1, added a reference to the Content-Disposition RFC.
In the example in 3.4.2.3, added a blank line after the message.
Added "name", "filename", and "smime-type" as optional parameters on
each of the registrations in Appendix E.
Removed old Appendix G (the S/MIME trademark) at the request of RSA.
RSA does not claim trademark rights to the name "S/MIME".
--Paul E. Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium