Re: Problems with MSP

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• Previous message: Raph Levien: "Problems with MSP"

Raph,

	Many thanks for your comments.

At 5:40 PM 2/14/96, Raph Levien wrote:
>   I did not like what I saw. Implementing MSP requires the
>implementation of a lot of X.400 and ASN.1 garbage. The whole thing would
>be very, very complex. I can see a single person implementing MOSS, PGP,
>or S/MIME, but probably not MSP.

	I'd be interested in your elaborating on your ASN.1 concerns.
S/MIME also uses ASN.1.  SNMP uses a restricted subset.  Opinions on ASN.1
vary but it is certainly true that it's used in running systems.

>additional encoding (presumably MIME base64). Thus, MSP signed messages
>would be unreadable to recipients not in possession of an MSP agent.
>   In my personal opinion, this is the single most important feature of
>any signed message format. PGP, PGP/MIME, MOSS, and S/MIME all go to

	I thought that S/MIME signed messages were NOT directly readable.
The spec advises that any desire to have a clear-text version of the data
requires a second copy of that data, carried in a multipart/alternative.

>   I agree that MSP's signed receipt type is valuable, but see no reason
>why it can't be implemented as, say, a MIME receipt type which is then
>signed with the standard MIME-based signature protocol. In other words, I
>see nothing inherent in MSP that enables this feature.

	Anyone else care to comment on this?

d/

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Dave Crocker                                                +1 408 246 8253
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