Peter,
Thanks for PEM WG agenda the reminder. Yes, I'd appreciate a
status report on USPS plans for certification activities, presumably
relative to the PKI report prepeared for NIST and other government
agencies by Mitre.
The two IDs on MIME-PEM loom large on the agenda. I'll assume
that authors will be prepared to describe the documents and provide a
detailed discussion of how the latest versions address the problems
uncovered in the previous versions.
I have received private communication from folks who want to
propose a minor mondification to 1421, to better accommodate the use
of symmetric keys distributed under the X9.17 standard. This seems
like a reasonable path to pursue, since several PEM implementations
have made at least some use of of symmetric key management in the
past, even though the standards encourage the use of asymmetric key
management. X9.17 is widely used in the financial community, so
piggybacking on that infrastructure for email key managment seems
appropriate for at least one potentially large user population
This topic also raises the question of whether symmetric key
managment ought to be retained in the MIME version of PEM. If the
MIME user community expresses no strong desire for such support then
this isn't a problem, unless the MIME version of PEM is proposed as a
successor to, not just an alternative to, the current standard. In
the later case, a lack of support for symmetrci key managment would
likely be an issue.
I'm open to other suggestions for the WG agenda. We have a
bit more than two weeks until the meeting, so there is still time to
add items.
Steve