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Re: WG and BoF Session Summary

2005-11-08 04:43:18

Russ Housley wrote:
We want a fairly short (no more than one-half page of text) summary that focuses on important decisions made during the meeting, and what is expected to happen in the few months. The summary would be sent to the WG or BoF mail list as well as the ADs (housley(_at_)vigilsec(_dot_)com and hartmans-ietf(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu).

Working group status. There are four drafts that are currently in the working group that have not become RFCs yet. symkeydist is still in the RFC editor's queue with a missing reference, waiting for the CMC draft to be released from PKIX. certcapa is in the RFC editor's queue and requires no further action. gost has a new release that was made recently, and is going to immediately progress to working group last call. KEM is waiting on work to complete in X9.44.

The open milestones for the working group fall into two categories. One category is progressing the CMS and S/MIME RFCs to draft standard status. The first step towards this is the completion of an interoperability report, which is waiting for interoperability work to be published from the PKIX working group. The other category surrounds the KEM algorithm draft, which is waiting for the X9.44 work to be completed (as noted above).

John Biccum from Microsoft announced that they will be S/MIME digitally signing security bulletins starting in February 2006. The root certificate is the software signing authority certificate that has been distributed with Windows essentially forever, and will be made available from Microsoft for non-Windows clients.

Mark Schertler from Voltage Security discussed their Identity Based Encryption (IBE) public key system, and proposed an integration with CMS using the OtherRecipientInfo field. The underlying algorithms are being discussed in the IEEE 1363.3 working group, and I expect that Voltage will be releasing individual internet-drafts in the short term, and we can further discuss the relevance to the S/MIME working group.

Russ Housley gave an overview of the algorithm transition we are undertaking, and the "walk, don't run" attitude that we have towards moving away from SHA-1 as a digest algorithm.

Jim Schaad presented a concern about the algorithm flexibility of the ESSCertID field. Right now this field is limited to the use of the SHA-1 algorithm, and Jim proposed the addition of an AlgorithmIdentifier to indicate the digest algorithm used to prepare the digest. Jim also proposed an idea for handling signature algorithm transitions in CMS. Basically, in each SignerInfo the signer would indicate the other SignerInfos that were added by the signer. Jim's theory was that this might help mitigate a downgrade attack where the signer applies both a SHA-256 signature and a SHA-1 signature, and the attacker removes the SHA-256 signature to force the receiver to use the SHA-1 signature.

Blake Ramsdell discussed a strawman for SHA-256 support in S/MIME. The draft as it stands right now needs more work to discuss both the reasons for the transition to SHA-256, as well as the considerations for handling the transition and processing multiple signature values, as well as using existing capabilities constructs for expressing support for SHA-256.

ACTION ITEMS:

* gost to WG last call

* Continued pressure to get CMC released to get symkeydist moving again

* Continue discussion about SHA-256 transition

Blake
--
Blake Ramsdell | Sendmail, Inc. | http://www.sendmail.com

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