On Tue, 19 Dec 1995, Ali Bahreman wrote:
The COST team in Europe I believe are also using classic-PEM. I think if
there is sufficient interest in the community to furthur classic-PEM as
IETF standards, then there needs to be a home for that activity to
discuss this. While the PEM-DEV could be used for this, I think there is
too much biggotry towards classic-PEM expressed by the members of PEM-DEV
list which would only be unproductive for all the community.
It seems to me it depends on what "futher"ing you are talking about.
If there are questions on what the classic-PEM RFCs mean, then I
don't think there would be any problem posting and answering those
questions on this list. If there is engineering work being suggested
to improve or modify classic-PEM, then I suspect the IESG would not be
supportive becasue of desires not to have two overlapping standards. So
it would be hard to form a WG and there might be some hostility here.
(Yes, I know there have been cases of simultaneously working on or
promulgating overlapping standards in the IETF, but they are rare.
Also note I can't speak for the IESG.) But I wonder what such engineering
would be? Might it not be something that would be useful for MOSS
also?
I don't know if a WG can have two mailing lists or not, but it looks
clear that there is a need for two if classic-PEM and MIME-capable PEM
(i.e. MOSS or S/MIME) are to be pursued independently by different
factions. I feel that they can co-exist just as SMTP and MIME do today.
Again, what is meant by "persue"? It seems clear that the way the
email and the web are going, MIME is taking over so it is not clear to
me what the advantages of classic-PEM are that would warrant major
additional engineering effort. (The lack of symetric keying in MOSS
may be a superiority of classic-PEM and come up at the Web Transaction
Security Working Group meeting in Dallas but that seems to point to
augmenting MOSS.)
I don't understand the remark about SMTP and MIME. They are in
no way replacements for each other or alternative ways of doing
the same thing. SMTP is to MIME like PEM is to RSA, not like PEM
is to MOSS.
I think forming this second mailing list and pursuing classic-PEM is
going to require alot of energy from the interested party. I should hope
that in the spirit of fairness, IETF would endorse it. But life isn't
always fair.
Fairness in deciding BETWEEN technological ideas is an IETF Goal. Fairness
to an technological idea, in the sense that because someone has suggested it
and so it has some right to be worked on within the official IETF framework
is an EXPLICIT NON-GOAL of the IETF.
Regards,
Ali
Donald
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