Re: dissemination of public encryption certificates

["Anders Rundgren" <[e-mail]>]

Pierre,
It is good to hear somebody bring up this question which is absolutely
vital for successful deployment of encrypted mail.

Personally I don't think that neither the S/MIME WG or XKMS WG
have a solution that at least I would call "acceptable".

XKMS addresses to some extent the enterprise scenario but only
if the enterprise has their own domain and associated CA.  For
truly TTP-based certificates you are out of luck if you are looking
for automated functionality.

I believe that the mail protocol and associated applications
should be augmented with encryption certificate lookup. A
MIME X-extension that you configured in your e-mail client
would do a part of this.  I.e. each time you sent a mail, the
lookup would be transmitted as well.   Also it would be
nice to have an enhanced "mailto:" URL supporting the same
mechanism.

In summary I think that a certificate-independent configuration
of e-mail clients would be more universal than "fishing" in
domains as the user domain and issuer domain may be entirely
disjunct.

Anders

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[e-mail]>
To: <[e-mail]>; <[e-mail]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2003 01:55
Subject: RE: dissemination of public encryption certificates


Hi,

This issue is one of the main use cases for XKMS. This has
considerable support within the PKI community, VeriSign, Microsoft, RSA,
Entrust and Baltimore have been involved in writing the specification
which is in the final post last call stage in W3C.

The (almost) final spec is to be found at 
http://www.w3.org/2001/XKMS/Drafts/XKMS20030804/xkms-part-1.html
http://www.w3.org/2001/XKMS/Drafts/XKMS20030804/xkms-part-2.html

There will be two further changes to the spec, one to make a
minor tweak to the schema sometime this week, the second to change the
examples to use exclusive C18N.

An XKMS locate service may be advertised in the DNS using the
SRV record. So to send mail to [e-mail] you do an XKMS locate
to _xkms_http._tcp.example.com.
That gives you the XKMS service.

You then do a locate for a certificate to be used with S/MIME.

Phill


> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Friday, August 08, 2003 10:07 PM
> To: [e-mail]
> Subject: dissemination of public encryption certificates
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Since this is my first posting to this mailing list, let me introduce 
> myself :
> 
> I'm a software engineer in AOL / Netscape and one of my 
> responsibilities 
> for several years has been to maintain the open source 
> Netscape Security 
> Services (NSS) library, which is used in the Mozilla browsers, many 
> Netscape and Sun servers, and other internal products. The 
> NSS library 
> contains an implementation of S/MIME v3.
> 
> I was wondering what thoughts you may have on the following problem :
> 
> If I have a keypair and e-mail certificate, and I want to 
> send encrypted 
> e-mail to somebody knowing his e-mail address, what's a 
> systematic way 
> to obtain the recipient's encryption certificate ?
> 
> Traditionally today, signed e-mail messages typically contain the 
> signer's public encryption certificate. However that means one party 
> needs to first send a signed unencrypted, e-mail message to 
> transmit the 
> public encryption certificate before both parties can 
> exchange encrypted 
> messages.
> 
> There are also ways to find recipient certificates today 
> using corporate 
> directory servers, but users must know about them and 
> manually configure 
> them in their applications, and they are typically not widely 
> available 
> on the Internet.
> 
> I'm envisioning some standardized scheme where, by starting with the 
> recipient's email address, it would be possible to locate a public 
> directory server, then find the recipient's certificate by 
> looking it up 
> in that directory server.
> 
> My main question is : has any similar scheme been proposed ? I would 
> rather work with something that exists, but if there is nothing that 
> fits, I'm open to writing an RFC.
> 
> Also, what are the other ways that people locate recipient 
> S/MIME e-mail 
> encryption certificates ?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 
>