IESG ACTION NEEDED: draft-ietf-smime-compression-03.txt

[Russ Housley <housley@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff & Marcus:

The S/MIME WG has finished work on the CMS compressed data type.  This 
Interned-Draft is ready for IETF Last Call and approval by the IESG as a 
standards-track RFC.

	Title		: Compressed Data Content Type for S/MIME
	Author(s)	: P. Gutmann
	Filename	: draft-ietf-smime-compression-03.txt
	Date		: 28-Nov-00
	
RFC 2630 (CMS) doesn't currently contain any provisions for compressing 
data before processing it. Compressing data before transmission provides a 
number of advantages including the elimination of data redundancy which 
could help an attacker, speeding
up processing by reducing the amount of data to be processed by later steps 
such as signing or encryption, and reducing overall message size. Although 
there have been proposals for adding compression at other levels (for 
example at the MIME or SSL level) these don't address the problem of 
compression of CMS content unless the
compression is supplied by an external means (for example by intermixing 
MIME and CMS).  This document defines a format for using compressed data as 
a CMS content type.

Russ