Subject: Protocol Action: Compressed Data Content Type for S/MIME to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 08 Mar 2002 18:37:39 -0500

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'Compressed Data Content Type
for S/MIME' <draft-ietf-smime-compression-07.txt> as a Proposed
Standard.  This document is the product of the S/MIME Mail Security
Working Group.  The IESG contact persons are Jeffrey Schiller and
Marcus Leech.

Technical Summary
 
  The Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS) data format which is used by
  SMIME does not provide for compression of content prior to
  encryption. Because encrypted data is incompressible, compression
  applied to an enciphered SMIME message will not prove helpful
  (whether done at the IP layer, or at a lower layer such as in a
  modem).

  Compressing data prior to encryption provides two important
  benefits.

  1) It decreases the size of a message.
  2) It makes cryptographic analysis of the contained message more
     difficult for compressed data has less redundancy for the
     cryptanalyst to exploit.

  This document provide a mechanism for adding compression prior to
  encryption in SMIME by being applied at the CMS layer.

Working Group Summary

  This document has the consensus of the SMIME Working Group.

Protocol Quality

 This document has been reviewed for the IESG by Jeffrey I. Schiller.