Re: [xcbf] Current Ballot

["Phillip H. Griffin" <phil.griffin@asn-1.com>]

John,

Unless members of XCBF at least vote,  the reason for us to
expend any further effort on this task is not clear. The value
of doing so is altogether a different issue, and to me is
obvious.

John Larmouth wrote:

> I am afraid these remarks may sound anti-American.  They are not 
> intended to be.  They are simply comments from someone working on 
> international and open standards, rather than on closed US-only 
> standards.
>
> X9.84 is a closed US-only standard (I will refrain from making nasty 
> remarks about who rules the world - whoops, I said it!) and I do not 
> have access to it.

X9 is the US TAG  for ISO TC68, an open international standards
body. TC68 coordinates with ISO/IEC JTC1 SC27, and has liaison
agreements with other bodies, such as ETSI for example. It is quite
likely that X9.84:2003 will be submitted to ISO, as the work it
replaces is already being referenced in a couple of international
standards body proposed NWIs. And financial services is a
particularly important market for security standards and products.

>
> OASIS is, at least nominally, a world-wide, open, public consortium, 
> although it is dominated by the US - but so are many *ISO* committees!.
>
> I therefore have two questions:
>
>     a)    Is the text of X9.84 identical (in all respects, or not) to 
> the proposed text of the OASIS XCBF?  (I actually do not know.)

No. XCBF could be considered but a subset of X9.84. But the
same person wrote the schemas, text and generated the examples.
And X9.84:2003 references normatively XCBF, as XCBF does
X9.84. The stated goal in our TC charter was to coordinate the
schemas and the cryptographic processing with XCBF and some
X9 work, and to provide a correct and standard mapping from
BioAPI to provide a secure XML representation of BIR values.

>
>     b)    And second, surely OASIS provides an international standard 
> (lower-case "i" and "s") where ANSI X9 **does not**, and hence an 
> OASIS Standard is worth proceeding with?  (I am aware that there are 
> moves to try to standardise X9.84 in IOS/IEC/JTC1/SC27, but that 
> standardisation will be a long way off.)

I posess no means of measuring who's on top of the standards world.
But I do view both organizations as important. Otherwise, I would not
bother to do work in them. The primary benefit to progressing the XCBF
work in OASIS is that it is open, the work freely available, and the TC
is part of an organization that is doing important work that I do not see
going on elsewhere - XCBF is innovative, and X9 provided us with a
schema, but readily adopted our processing and schema changes.

And as you pointed out in an earlier post, there is a communcation process
between OASIS and ITU-T - note tha Dr. Gerome is our liaison to SG17,
and has expressed an interest in making use of a completed XCBF
standard in that venue.

Phil

>
> John L
>
>
> Phillip H. Griffin wrote:
>
>> Just to clear things up for all members, especially for those
>> of you who voted long ago on this item, the current issue
>> under ballot is the following:
>>
>> So far I have four votes to accept this motion, and Ed's vote
>> just now, which I believe is to reject this motion. No other
>> members cast a vote.
>>
>> So the motion to accept the proposed public review comment
>> revisions has failed to pass ballot. And our original CS document
>> stands - though it is now no longer in synch with X9.84:2003, as
>> all of the proposed revisions were accepted and incorporated
>> into that work.
>>
>> I'd be interested in any suggestions as to how the group would
>> like to move forward. Should we consider our work completed
>> with publication of our initial CS?
>>
>> Does anything more remain to be done?
>>
>> Phil
>>
>>
>>
>> Phillip H. Griffin wrote:
>>
>>>> Attached with revision bars showing are all changes made as a
>>>> result of the public comment review.
>>>>
>>>> Please take a look at these changes and send a note to the list
>>>> if you accept these as our new Committee Specification 1.0 as
>>>> soon as possible.
>>>>
>>>> Upon acceptance, I will try to move the process forward and
>>>> have our work considered by OASIS as an OASIS Standard.
>>>>
>>>> Phil
>>>
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