ietf-smime
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Re: The address-in-certs issue

1997-12-22 14:59:02
Elliott N Ginsburg wrote:
I don't see why everyone assumes that S/MIME equates with email. It is
likely to be carried over HTTP and there is an electronic commerce/EDI
group looking at it for use there.

Internet mail is the primary application for S/MIME.  That is, if
Internet mail applications using S/MIME fail to interoperate, then the
S/MIME standard has clearly failed.  This is not true for any other
application.

If the choices made in S/MIME make it useful for other applications,
then that is a bonus.  There is every reason to think that RFC822 syntax
identities are usable for common Internet HTTP.

If some other application does not need to fully interoperate with
Internet mail, would like to use the bulk of S/MIME, but finds S/MIME's
requirements insufficient or inappropriate, then the thing for that
application to do is to *PROFILE* S/MIME, specifying whatever identity,
cipher, etc. requirements it needs instead of or in addition to the base
S/MIME standard.

Interoperability and generality are diametrically opposed. 
Interoperability is Job #1.  Generality is secondary.


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