John,
I understand and respect your point.
My memory could be failing me here, but I believe that the consensus of
opinion following Tim Dean's
interoperability presentation (I think Jim Schaad expressed it quite well)
in the WG meeting in December was that the issue of allowing Signatures to
remain intact when going through gateways to other security protocols was
important - though not directly under the charter for the group.
As you are aware there are implementations out there that employ signatures
over X.411 labels - primarily using MSP (and soon PCT). To allow signatures
over labels to pass through such gateways does require a bits-on-the-wire
compatibility, and I believe that anything that ESS does to prevent this
will delay acceptance of the protocol for my customers. For my customers,
interoperability with other security protocols through gateways is a primary
requirement.
I appreciate that some of this is outside the scope of this group.
See you all in LA - perhaps we can discuss further then.
Darren