Subject: Re: X9.42 and RFC2459 inconsistency?

From: Andrew Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 18:36:56 +0100

In message <[email-masked]>you write:
>"William Whyte" <[email-masked]> writes:

>>There seems to be an inconsistency between X9.42 and RFC 2459 about how to 
>>encode Diffie-Hellman public keys.

>During RFC 2459's draft stages this was changed to the current form when it
>was pointed out that the X9.42 version was essentially unworkable (it 
>required complicated and unnecessary processing of the value which is
>incompatible with the way any other subjectPublicKey is handled, and it's
>practically guaranteed that implementors will get it wrong in a variety of
>ways which will cause all sorts of headaches - the values will look right
>and even work properly, they just won't give the expected results when used
>with implementations which do it differently to however you're doing it).

Cool (and a welcome gesture towards fixing broken stuff). So why do we
use their OID?

>Peter.

Andrew.

---

From: Andrew Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 14:21:35 +0100

>Cool (and a welcome gesture towards fixing broken stuff). So why do we

Sine there's been a deafing silence on this topic, I have two further
questions:

(1) Are there any deployed codebases which would object to changing the
Diffie-Hellman OID in rfc2459 to reflect the fact that it has different
semantics than in X9.42? 

I know that John Pawling has stated that Van Dyke's S/MIME Freeware
Library has no issues, and as far as I know Microsoft haven't shipped
anything with Diffie-Hellman, so that S/MIME would appear to be in the
clear on this.

(2) Are there any other groups that profile 2459 that we should ask
about this?.

Andrew