Rik,
I respectfully disagree with your proposal to add fields to the ESS signed
receipt to accomplish MDN functionality. Your proposal combines two very
different concepts into a single ASN.1 syntax and mechanism. This will be
extremely confusing to the implementors, users and everyone else involved,
and will make the ESS signed receipt processing significantly more complex.
If the originator needs proof that the recipient simply received a message
and was able to verify its signature, then the originator requests a ESS
signed receipt. The concept is that signed receipts are generated
automatically by the receiving software and are sent automatically to the
originating agent to indicate ONLY that the message was received and the
signature was verified. There is no human intervention required in this
process.
Many of the services that you are proposing require a human to make
decisions. This is a very different concept than ESS signed receipts and
should be separated into a different ASN.1 syntax and implemented separately.
You propose to add some fields to the receipt body. Although these are
minor syntax changes, they are major semantic changes. The current ESS
signed receipt strategy allows the recipient's security software module to
generate the signed receipt automatically with no actions required by the
user. If your proposed fields are added, then the ESS signed receipt can no
longer be constructed automatically by the security software because the
user will need to be prompted regarding which fields must be included in the
signed receipt. This is a major change in the concept and procesing
requirements of ESS signed receipts.
================================
John Pawling, jsp(_at_)jgvandyke(_dot_)com
J.G. Van Dyke & Associates, Inc.
www.jgvandyke.com
================================
At 04:24 PM 4/15/98 -0500, Rik Drummond wrote:
I disagree with Paul's comment below also. I agree with David's response.
Nice job David.
The only difference is that the MDN carries additional status
information.... over and above what the ESS receipt carries. With all the
work that was done by the EDIINT and the MDN workgroups on receipts, I
would have hoped that some of that functionality would have been included
in the ESS stuff.
Lack of this functionality makes use of this a lot harder for the EDIINT
workgroup, of which SMIME is a base standard, and other groups like the fax
group. So please tell me know how to formally get this functionality into
the ESS stuff, without causing delays or problems for the authors. I
would think all we need to do is steal from the MDN status codes and This
is a very different concept
than signed receipts and should be separated into a different ASN.1 syntax..
That does not seem hard to
me.
Thanks, Rik