ietf-smime
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Critical Attributes

1998-01-29 11:15:16
At 12:51 PM 1/29/98 -0500, Russ Housley wrote:
On the other hand, the critical attribute list makes no change to the
syntax.  However, an S/MIME 2 implementation would simply ignore this
attribute as it would any other unsupported attribute.  So, the criticality
of the attributes would not really be imposed.

In fact, it would not be imposed at all. Because someone writing a message
with
a critical attribute cannot know the version of S/MIME used by the recipient,
they don't know if the recipient will reject the message if they don't
understand the attribute. This is a terrible situation, I think. We would be
creating "critical for v3 clients only" attributes.

This breifi analysis leads to to the coluclusion that the critical boolean
is a better path.  Is there concensus on this point?

That sounds right to me.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>