At 12:10 PM 2/2/98 -0800, Jonathan Penn wrote:
the question is whether to allow & how to implement:
* multiple signatures on a messages
These can be nested to arbitrary depth. See section 3.5 of the -msg spec.
* different signatures on different parts
It is not required in the spec that a receiving MUA be able to handle anything
other than direct nesting. There are many security reasons for this. Did you
miss Ned Freed's very concise explantion for this? See
<http://www.imc.org/ietf-smime/mail-archive/1079.html>.
That is, nothing prevents you from signing many parts of a multipart message,
but you can't do it securely, so I doubt many implementations will handle it.
is S/MIME going to be compatible with these simple forms routing examples?
Nothing prevents S/MIME from handling methods such as you have listed, but it
is not required that implementations do so.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium