7. In the X.509 context, the two MIME/PEM identifiers to choose from
for Originator-ID and Recipient-ID are:
<id-dname> ::= "DN" "," <keysel> "," <dnamestr> CRLF
and
<id-publickey> ::= "PK" "," <publickey> CRLF (I left out the
optional
name here)
Given that you aren't trying to hide the public key, when would you
use the <id-dname> instead of the <id-publickey>?
On possible reason for doing this is that the process of looking up the
public key may also return additional, useful information. In X.500,
the distinguished name provides me a pointer to an entry in the the
X.500 Directory, the entry that contains all the public information
about me, not just my public key or certificate. I could use this
information to track down additional, ancillary information, for example
a CRL for my certificate.
Jim