Steve,
GMD (the German National Research Center for Mathematics and Computer
Science) has recently finished its own PEM implementation. The first
use of this (Unix-based) software will be in a national pilot with
German university administrations, and in a European pilot as part of
the EC-funded PASSWORD project where we participate together with
University College London, INRIA (France), U Cambridge and a number
of commercial partners. Later we plan a deployment of PEM to the
German R & D community.
Since we consider it essential to have full interoperability with
US sites in the future, we are interested to find a reference test
site for our implementation. Is there any support from TIS for that
purpose? I know that messages from TIS to pem-dev sometimes are in
PEM format, but this is not sufficient. We would need to receive PEM
messages produced by the test site in various formats (including
PEM-Encrypted, and including certificates) which can be verified and
decrypted by us, and to receive notifications whether the test site
was able to verify and decrypt messages generated by us.
Once ICIR is being operational, we are interested to join the Internet
certification tree. I can imagine that GMD runs a PCA for the German
R & D. However, the necessary organizational, technical and other
prerequisites to do so ar not clear to me.
I will be attending the next IETF in Columbus. I would appreciate if
we could find an opportunity to discuss these issues during the meeting.
Best regards
Wolfgang Schneider