Re: [pkix] Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP)

[Melinda Shore <[e-mail]>]

On 10/14/14 8:29 AM, Stephen Kent wrote:
>> Nice word, "lie". It indicates that everyone at Cisco has the same 
>> intent, and they are all instructed in what to say in public.
>> Anyone working with the Cisco IPsec team at the time knows that
>> such an assertion is demonstrably false, even though it makes for
>> good drama here.

> I agree that Cisco may not have coordinated the rationale we were
> given for publishing SCEP, but we got the same story from multiple
> individuals in a few different parts of the organization. As an
> outsider, I think that "lie" is an appropriate characterization.

I was at Cisco at the time.  That is not correct.  Interest in
bring SCEP to the IETF waxed and waned and at different points
different people showed different levels of interest in working on
getting the spec through the IETF process.  Nobody was ever instructed
to lie - I'd be hard-pressed to say that anybody was instructed to
do much of anything in terms of publishing SCEP.  My understanding
of the 3gpp situation was that someone at Cisco wanted to
take SCEP to 3gpp and that's what motivated a renewed interest
in publishing it as an informational document (within Cisco; whether
the responsible IETF people were more interested in publishing it
as an historic RFC is largely orthogonal to that).

Without actually talking with the people involved all we can go
on is what we see.  It's a black box problem.  Fabricating a narrative
and making judgments based on that fabricated narrative strikes me
as profoundly unhelpful.

Melinda