RE: Charter Revision

["Phillip M Hallam-Baker" <[e-mail]>]

> 1) There is significant work being done in the ISO committees (i.e. FPDAM)
> that will impact the X.509 Attribute Certificate syntax.  
> Recommend that we
> add the following text to the charter: "CMS imports the Attribute
> Certificate syntax from X.509.  If the AC syntax is changed (as is
> expected), then CMS will be enhanced to import the revised syntax."

This is definitely NOT a topic for S/MIME.

In the first place CMS should be importing semantics from PKIX, not
X.509. S/MIME has not addressed PKI infrastructure issues up to this
point and I don't think it is a good time to start.

In the second place simply adding attribute certificates because they
have appeared in an ISO proposal seems a very bad plan. Lots of
ideas make it into ISO specifications that never make it into the
real world. 


The approach S/MIME should take is to look to see what _functionality_
it wants to add to S/MIME to solve _problems_. Simply adding technology
for the sake of it is a very bad move.

The proper place to address attribute certificates would be either
PKIX or more likely a new group focussed on some _use_ of attribute
certificates. I suspect however that a such a group would want to
consider other technologies as well (attributes stored in a
trusted directory, attributes embedded in an OCSP call, etc.).

		Phill