Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-santesson-smime-scext-00.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 18:32:58 -0700

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title		: S/MIME Capabilities in X.509 certificates
	Author(s)	: S. Santesson
	Filename	: draft-santesson-smime-scext-00.txt
	Pages		: 7
	Date		: 2004-8-10

This document defines a certificate extension for inclusion of S/MIME
    capabilities in public key certificates as defined by RFC 3280.

    S/MIME Capabilities provides a method of broadcasting the
    cryptographic S/MIME capabilities of the certified subject as a
    complement to use of S/MIME Capabilities signed attributes as defined
    in RFC 3851.

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From: "Anders Rundgren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 10:34:38 +0200

I have no comments on the "design" in this draft.

However, I seriously question the idea to put client software
capabilities in certificates.

Why?
- because issuers may not have this information
- because users may have multiple clients
- because static solutions are limiting

If we begin to use dynamic methods like XKMS + DNS to find
public keys of recipients, SCEXT represents a step in another direction.

Due to the limited utility of true end-to-end encryption in corporate
environments (the DOMSEC RFC shows a few good reasons to that),
as well as the de-facto use of the web as a distribution medium for
e-government purposes (which is a much easier solution than S/MIME),
I believe that Microsoft should focus on making a gateway e-mail
standard a reality rather than patching a system that never will play
a major role and actually mostly creates problems for end-users and
system administrators.

Anders