At 09:58 PM 2/2/98 -0700, Michael Myers wrote:
The agreement reached in D.C. clearly pointed to CRS, as documented in the
minutes. No objections were raised to the point.
<flame>
It was also agreed that CRS would come out before January 1, and that it would
fully specify what we needed to use in S/MIME v3, and it would be the work of
the PKIX WG, so we could either point directly to it or make a simple profile
of it. Two months later, we haven't seen a single usable draft, and there is
still rampant disagreement among the people working on the solution. Consider
this an objection based on new information.
</flame>
We further discussed
details of this task in San Francisco. Again, no objections were raised on
the point.
I think most of the people in the room in San Francisco would have taken my
very pointed comments to you about the lateness and incompleteness of CRMF to
be an objection. Certainly, no one accused me of being overly polite to you
about the situation. :-) If you didn't hear my comments as an objection,
let me
try again: I object to S/MIME v3 being possibly delayed waiting for a spec
that
is months late and is mired in political squabbling that all sides agree has
little technical justification and seems to mostly be about installed base
instead of what's best for applications like S/MIME.
If CRS/CRMF/whatever was needed for our protocol, we'd be stuck waiting for an
IETF solution. Fortunately (and I give John Pawling original credit here),
many
of us have realized that we don't need to specify how to do PKI in S/MIME, so
we can cleanly remove this from S/MIME and let the PKIX group take however
long
it wants to specify.
So much for my winning Miss Congeniality this year...
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium