Subject: Re: Extensibility discussion

From: "John Ross" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 1998 13:05:46 -0800

I believe CMS does not use the latest ASN.1 so that is one reason why I did
not propose "add a '...' to the ASN.1".

But I would be happy with that option in the CMS document, if that was
considered more acceptable.

I agree with you that additions to the choice need not be defined in CMS
itself, MESS could be used.

Regards

JR
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Gutmann <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked] <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked] <[email-masked]>
Date: Tuesday, December 08, 1998 2:24 AM
Subject: Re: Extensibility discussion

>"John Ross" <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>>but what about extending the choice, are you also opposed to that?
>
>This is easy to handle in theory (just add a '...' to the ASN.1) but a bit
>more difficult to handle in practice since you need some way to coordinate
the
>extensions of the choice (everyone can't just add their own '[n] FooInfo').
>
>It may be possible to maintain a register of extensions, one thing I'm
>(gradually) working on, if no support is added to CMS itself, is extensions
to
>Recipient/SignerInfo to allow it to be used with the other
IETF-standardised
>(or about-to-be-standardised) certificate/key formats (which I mentioned in
a
>previous message).  At the moment this lives under the name More Enhanced
>Security Services (MESS) for S/MIME, I've had a fair bit of comment on this
>from other groups (eg OpenPGP members) who would like to see CMS less tied
to
>X.509 certs for everything it does.
>
>What MESS does is add a few trivial extensions to the current CMS stuff to
>support these additional formats, it's just the additional key identifiers
I
>mentioned in a previous message plus a few other bits and pieces.  If
people
>wanted either new key identifiers or recipient info types, and provided
there
>was a reasonable justification for them (for example "x zillion PGP users
need
>to have this" is a good one), it could be added to the MESS.
>
>Peter.
>
>

---

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Dec 1998 11:09:11 -0500

You are correct.  CMS uses 1988 ASN.1.

Russ