SecureConnect 1 Final Report
prepared by
Paul Hoffman
Internet Mail Consortium
Internet Mail Consortium Report: SC1-FINAL
IMCR-011, August 8, 1998
SecureConnect 1, held July 23-24, 1998 in San Jose, California,
was the first interoperability event for testing S/MIME
version 2 and version 3 implementations. The event also
included many certificate authority vendors who tested the
ability of S/MIME clients to use a variety of types of
certificates.
The companies testing at SecureConnect 1 were:
- Baltimore Technologies
- Entrust
- Peter Gutmann
- International DataTrust
- Microsoft
- Netscape
- RSA Data Security
- Thawte
- Van Dyke and Associates
- VeriSign
- Worldtalk
- XCert
The event was considered a success by the companies in attendance. The
participants spent two days doing extensive testing against other
implementations and discussing how to move the industry forwards.
During the event, a few trends became clear:
- There was a very high interoperability of S/MIME v2 clients.
None of the bugs found at IMC's earlier S/MIME interoperability
event were found in shipping clients, and only a few small
implementation problems were found among the various shipping clients
and servers.
- There was almost complete success with S/MIME clients adding roots
from new certificate authorities. This was particularly heartening because
there were CA vendors who had not worked with some of the S/MIME vendors
at the event, but there were no problems found with adding
certificates from these vendors.
- The vendors who were testing signatures based on the DSA
algorithm, which is not yet in wide use, reported no interoperability
problems.
- In general, CA-to-CA chaining went well. The CA vendors reported
that they had very little problem working with each others' certificates
and validation procedures.
It was also decided that SecureConnect 2 should take place in early spring
of 1999.
This IMC Report is IMCR-011 and is named SC1-FINAL.
New versions of IMC reports are given new report
numbers but the name of the report remains the same.
You can get the newest version of this report from the
IMC Web site at
<http://www.imc.org/sc1-final.html>.
A list of available IMC reports can be found at
<http://www.imc.org/reports.html>.
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