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Subject: RE: [emergency] CAP and Signatures/Encryption


Carl Reed wrote:
> the S/MIME electronic mail security protocol that is widely 
> implemented in commercial mail agents.
	S/MIME would, of course, be a good protocol to use if the transport
mechanism for the CAP message was email. This is an example of the "channel"
or "transport" providing signature and or encryption mechanisms external to
the CAP message itself. 
	However, we should not hold out a great deal of hope for S/MIME use.
The problem is that S/MIME has simply not been adopted as widely as it could
have been even though it has been defined and implemented for a very long
time (I managed the first commercial implementation of S/MIME back in 1995
and the current chair of the IETF working group is the guy I assigned to the
project almost a decade ago!) The lack of S/MIME adoption and or use has
been a real disappointment and it would be great to see efforts to
popularize it. However, it undoubtedly isn't within the charter of the CAP
group to do the necessary evangelizing.

>IPSEC ..
	IPSEC is another example of mechanisms which are best used at a
"channel" or "transport" level. As such it isn't really relevant to the
question of how one provides signatures or encryption within a CAP message.

	Other examples of channel based mechanism include, of course, the
WS-Security stuff which would be appropriate if SOAP were being used as the
transport. Also, TLS/SSL would be appropriate for use with transport
mechanisms such as HTTP (including SOAP over HTTP), BEEP, various other
socket oriented protocols, etc.
	However, while there are quite a variety of transport/channel
specific methods to choose from, the W3C Recommendations are the accepted
mechanisms for providing signatures and encryption *within* XML messages.

		bob wyman




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