pem-dev
[Top] [All Lists]

Use of MIME-PEM outside MIME

1994-12-28 18:42:00
Ned Freed writes:

I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it. Part of the MIME work has been to provide
means to integrate capabilites into existing mail systems in a as seamless
and automatic a fashion as possible. A considerable amount of effort has been
invested on this front, with the result that it is possible to add MIME
capabilities to an enormous number of existing mail systems fairly easily.

As someone interested in supporting encryption services in MIME, Non-MIME, and 
other applications, this is good news.  Does this mean the encryption and 
digital signature capability can be easily abstracted and used in other 
applications such as secured file storeage, etc?  If so, are we dependent on 
individual MIME-PEM vendors do to this?  I really don't want to install (or pay 
for) this type of service multiple times.

One related (possibly obvious) question:
If I receive a Trusted public key, name form from someone, I assume I need to 
store it for further use.  If so, I need a database which stores public keys 
accessable by name form or something else.  Is it anticiapted that MIME-PEM 
products will include this or is this additional effort for deployment?  If 
it's provided by the vendors, will this database be exposed for applications 
described in the previous paragraph?

My apologies if this is obvious, I'm trying to work through the possible 
implemenation, scalability issues.

BTW, I agree with the comments regarding the call for comments on MIME-PEM so 
close to the holidays.  Was a decision reached on that?

Phil Smiley  psmiley(_at_)lobby(_dot_)ti(_dot_)com


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