ietf-smime
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RE: Rethinking Receipt

1998-04-14 11:50:05
At 08:36 PM 4/13/98 -0500, Rik Drummond wrote:
I believe if you read the RFC for the MDN, which includes how to do 
receipts you will find that a signed receipt may contain information such 
as "deleted" and "processed".

Warning, warning: layering violation! RFC 2298 never talks about signed
receipts. And nor should it.

The ESS signed receipt has a much narrower focus than RFC 2298 for good
reason: it's much simpler for the recipient of the receipt to understand
what they get. S/MIME with or without ESS works just fine with RFC 2298
messages. The recipient of the RFC2298 message has the option of signing
their MDN using plain, ordinary S/MIME without ESS.

Please remember that ESS is an optional part of S/MIME v3. I do not want a
situation where in order to get a signed copy of the kind of information an
MDN gives, both sides must have ESS. That's a protocol layering violation.
As long as S/MIME v3 doesn't prohibit MDN messages (which it of course
doesn't), we've got all the parts we need. If we duplicate the kind of
information in an RFC2298 response, we open ourselves to all sorts of
problems, and I doubt we'll get it on standards track with such an obvious
layering violation.

As for EDIINT, I would strongly urge you to simply have RFC 2298 MDN
messages that are signed by S/MIME v3 without ESS. You should add the
requirement that the recipient of a receipt request should not sign the
response unless they could validate the originator's signature.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium

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