On Tue, 22 Feb 1994, John Lowry wrote:
Your design looks a lot like RIPEM. I think that most of the functions
you want are already present there: there is a key server, support for
finger key distribution, etc. Its use in the internet is even growing.
But it is not PEM.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Exactly, which is the basic problem with PEM at the moment. The leading
implementation of something PEM-like which has the biggest growth
potential on the Internet due to its "bottom up" hierarchy, is not PEM
compliant by a strict interpretation of the standard. It is PEM that
needs to change to address what RIPEM has discovered during deployment.
Just because it may not be "pure" does not make it "wrong". When are we
going to see an RFC on RIPEM's extensions or an RFC extending PEM to
cater for what RIPEM can do, maybe with different "pure" mechanisms?
Cheers,
Rhys.