Re: IETF 60 SMIME Minutes

["Sean P. Turner" <[e-mail]>]

Seeing no comments I'll pass these on to the proceedings folks.

Sean P. Turner wrote:

[e-mail]">

Minutes for Secure MIME (S/MIME) WG Meeting
IETF #60
Tuesday PM III Session

Agenda: Blake Ramsdell covered the agenda for the meeting. No changes were made.

Working Group Status: Blake Ramsdell covered the status of the active documents in the working group.  the documents that have changed status since the last meeting are:

Published as RFC:
- draft-ietf-smime-rfc2632bis-08 is now approved as RFC 3850
- draft-ietf-smime-rfc2633bis-10 is now approved as RFC 3851
- draft-ietf-smime-rfc3369bis-05 is now approved as RFC 3852
- draft-ietf-smime-x400wrap-09 is now approved as RFC 3854
- draft-ietf-smime-x400transport-09 is now approved as RFC 3855

RFC Editor Queue:
- PSS is pinned by a PSS document in PKIX.  schaad reported that PSS has also been awaiting an IESG write-up since April.  housley indicated that he would check on this.
- SYMKEYDIST is pinned by CMCbis (from PKIX) which is in turn pinned by CRMFbis (from PKIX).

Others:
- EXAMPLES - A new release incorporates some edits, but is essentially done.  New version was after deadline, so will go to WG Last Call as soon as queue opens up.
- GOST - Some editorial issues to take care of.  Draft is good until October.
- KEM - See later discussion.
- RFC2624bis - Not yet published; fixes some problems with ML expansion and receipt policy; moves them into separate attributes.

Milestone Updates:
- Updates to MSG and CERT for Proposed Standards.
- Submitted RSA PSS as a Proposed Standard
- Milestones themselves need to be updated to more realistic dates especially for RSA KEM.

KEM Status - ramsdell said he received a status update from burt kaliski (RSA) on KEM. RSA KEM I-D has alignment relationship with ISO/IEC 18033-2 and ANSI X9.44. Outstanding issues in X9.44 include: text on assurance of validity of public keys, possession of private key, and security considerations.  Clearly these need to be resolved before advancing.  Expect substantial completion of ISO/IEC 18033-2 and ANSI X9.44 in mid-2005 with formalities continuing into 2006.  The KEM I-D will be updated to track these, but should not be finalized until balloting begins.  PKCS #1 may also be updated.  Upshot is that we will probably not complete the KEM I-D until late 2005 or early 2006.

Formats for Long Term Electronic Signatures - ross briefly introduced the background of the project for ETSI to establish guidelines for digital signatures that will have legal standing. RFC 3126 was produced to align with the ETSI document.  Additional changes to the underlying signature standards (CMS, etc.) have somewhat advanced the discussion.  The updated I-D that would obsolete RFC 3126.  housley asked whether he was asking to take this on as a WG item.  10 or so were in favor, and no objections were voiced.

Boneh-Franklin Identity Based Encryption in S/MIME - martin presented this proposal for an alternative to PKI-based encryption.  Based on a process for deriving a public key based on a string representation of the user identity.  The mechanism relies on supersingular elliptic curves.  It uses a Tate pairing on a particular supersingular curve that has been tested to ensure that it isn’t cryptographically “bad”.  The public key must be obtained from a key server so it isn’t good for digital signature, but is okay for encryption.  Bottom line is that this is being proposed as an alternative key exchange mechanism for use with CMS/SMIME.  There were technical questions about how the identity is bound to the identity string, and there were IPR questions.  ramsdell indicated that the politics of the solution aside, he considered this interesting to the WG as something that is using CMS.  ramsdell summarized that the WG is basically in a monitoring mode with respect to this proposal, but there are clearly some concerns wrt IPR and complexity.  He noted that that he would like to see some more before definition considering this any further.  turner pointed out that you could still develop the draft as an individual submission.  housley remarked that this would give people an opportunity better evaluate the idea.

X.509 S/MIME Capabilities - santesson gave an overview of his proposal that the S/MIME Capabilities attribute from RFC 2633 be included in the user certificate.  The proposal is to include the attribute as a non-critical extension as opposed to in the subject directory attributes extension.  ramsdell asked if there were any opposition to bringing this in as a WG item. No opposition was expressed.

Other Business: There was some discussion about closing the WG, but it was decided to poll the WG for work items prior to each meeting to better assess whether it should meet at future IETF meetings.