[Evolution] S/MIME and SSL thoughts

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj helixcode com>]

So it seems as though NSS will be split into 3 libs (one for SSL one for S/MIME and one other one) if it's not already done.

I think we should keep an eye out for this...

also, while searching google for S/MIME related articles, I came accross this:
http://www.networkcomputing.com/902/902r2.html


The following snippet is the part that was the most interesting:

 Evaluating S/MIME as an enterprise solution was an eye-opening experience. We found some level of interoperability problems with every S/MIME product. Surprisingly, no product could successfully send and receive signed or encrypted messages for every one of its peers. Likewise, there were two disparate and incompatible certificate enrollment strategies (Web versus MIME-encoded messages) and two different S/MIME encoding formats (see "The Choice Is Clear," at www. Network Computing.com/902/902r2. html)--plus various hashing and encryption algorithms.

I believe that the main reason for this incompatability is that it's not an easy task to determine which digest and cipher alogorithms the other clients support. This is why I think we should put S/MIME off until after 1.0 (maybe 1.2?) and instead have PGP/MIME ready to go by 1.0.

Jeff