CONSENSUS: Contenders Should Negotiate

Dave Crocker (dcrocker@brandenburg.com)
Sat, 24 Feb 1996 09:20:32 -0800 

	At the end of the Resolving Email Security Complexity workshop,
attendees expressed a strong desire to have proponents of the various email
security technologies work together to reduce the differences among the
alternatives.  While it might not be possible to reach the
operationally-preferred world of One True email security mechanism, it well
might be possible to create more overlap among the alternatives.  Such
overlap would reduce the amount of overall implementation complexity and,
therefore, opportunities for implementation error.  It could also permit
selective portions of interoperability.

	To that end, a timeline was specified, with agreement in spirit by
those proponents of alternatives who were present (and with the obvious and
essential caveat that they could not formally commit their communities):

1 April
-------
Proponents of the various email security alternatives shall produce a list
of the specific differences among the alternatives.  This is a cataloguing
effort.

1 June
------
Proponents (separately or jointly) shall document the need for each
difference.  This is an engineering rationale effort.

24 June
-------
At the Montreal IETF there shall be meetings among the proponents to
attempt to eliminate whatever differences are feasible.

Follow-on
---------
Generate IETF draft specifications, as appropriate, for those items which
can be made common to the alternatives.

	The consensus, then, was that proponents engage in a process.
Discussions should be held in public or in private, as appropriate for
making progress.  The 1 April and 1 June milestones are intended to permit
public review of the process' progress.

	(Ed. Note:  I offered a straw candidate for commonality, namely the
format and other details of data encrypted.  Besides generally reducing
complexity, it would permit a message to be sent to recipients who use
different certification schemes, while sharing the same data encryption
scheme.  Multipart/encrypted is designed to work for such a scenario quite
well.)

d/

--------------------
Dave Crocker                                                +1 408 246 8253
Brandenburg Consulting                                 fax: +1 408 249 6205
675 Spruce Dr.                                     dcrocker@brandenburg.com
Sunnyvale CA 94086 USA                           http://www.brandenburg.com

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