Re: [Acme] ACME or EST?

Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman@vpnc.org> Wed, 26 November 2014 00:04 UTC

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From: Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman@vpnc.org>
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Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 16:03:59 -0800
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To: Tony Arcieri <bascule@gmail.com>
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Cc: Richard Barnes <rlb@ipv.sx>, acme@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [Acme] ACME or EST?
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On Nov 25, 2014, at 2:59 PM, Tony Arcieri <bascule@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 2:50 PM, Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman@vpnc.org> wrote:
> The JOSE message structure has been much more problem-laden than CMS ever was. Yes, ASN.1 is ugly; many people feel the same (or worse) about JOSE.

Yep, shades of grey or, in this case, shades of mud.

> We make extensive use of both CMS and JOSE for our enterprise's HSM-backed encryption service. We've gone full bore switching from CMS to JOSE with everyone agreeing CMS is terrible and JOSE is less terrible.
> 
> Are there specific concerns you have?

Wait for it...

> I think the main advantage is JOSE is considerably easier to implement than ASN.1, and aside from a handful of problems

There you go. :-) Folks who have fought with ASN.1 longer than JOSE find CMS's "handful of problems" already solved and JOSE's ones completely frustrating because they were brought up in the WG years ago (literally) and never fixed.

It doesn't matter; JOSE will work adequately for ACME.

--Paul Hoffman