ietf-smime
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: rfc2633bis and multipart/encrypted

2002-05-03 13:44:16

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Gutmann" <pgut001(_at_)cs(_dot_)aucKland(_dot_)ac(_dot_)nz>
To: <ietf-smime(_at_)imc(_dot_)org>; <mutz(_at_)kde(_dot_)org>
Sent: Friday, May 03, 2002 7:15 AM
Subject: Re: rfc2633bis and multipart/encrypted



Marc Mutz <mutz(_at_)kde(_dot_)org> quotes:

While we are on the topic of MIME and encryption -- does anyone know
the history behind S/MIME not using multipart/encrypted of RFC 1847
for encrypted data?

Politics AFAIK.  The encryption stuff in RFC 1847 was part of the MOSS
worldview, and MOSS != S/MIME.  At the time, RSADSI and the RSA patent
were a
bigger hammer, so S/MIME won.

This is mostly true.  Another part of this is that we ended up adopting
multipart/signed, and deliberately chose not to adopt multipart/encrypted
for some reason (which I think is what Russ pointed out as backward
compatibility).  I think the general argument was that it didn't add
anything to the protocol or the processing of the data, and the only thing
that it might add in our case is a potential clue to the processing agent
that "this thing is encrypted".  I thought there was a thread about this,
but I couldn't find it.

Blake


<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>