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RE: More on KEKIdentifiers, and a suggested addition to CMS

Darren Harter <darren@sapher.com> Fri, 12 March 1999 13:08 UTC

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From: Darren Harter <darren@sapher.com>
To: 'John Ross' <ross@secstan.com>, "rankney@erols.com" <rankney@erols.com>, "pgut001@cs.aucKland.ac.nz" <pgut001@cs.aucKland.ac.nz>, Russ Housley <housley@spyrus.com>
Cc: "ietf-smime@imc.org" <ietf-smime@imc.org>, "burt@RSA.COM" <burt@RSA.COM>
Subject: RE: More on KEKIdentifiers, and a suggested addition to CMS
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 09:16:54 -0000
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John,

I agree in general with what you propose.  I understand the benefit of using an OCTET STRING to ensure easy decoding for recipients that do not understand the syntax of the data associated with keyTypeIdentifier.  However, I believe that a true ANY would be better than an OCTET STRING in this case.

Applications that support CMS already have to deal with a lot of ANY's, so one more is not going to add much complexity.  Also, using an ANY rather than an OCTET STRING allows for a single pass decode process, which an embedded OCTET STRING encoding does not.

The amended part of your syntax would be:

ExternalyDefinedKeyAgreement :: = SEQUENCE {
    keyTypeIdentifier OBJECT IDENTIFIER,
    keyTypeInfo ANY DEFINED BY keyTypeIdentifier }


Regards,

Darren

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Darren Harter BSc (Hons) CEng MBCS
Entegrity Solutions Corp
http://www.entegrity.co.uk
+44 (0) 1452 371383
Email: mailto:darren@sapher.com

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