Ägypte n with S/MIME and OpenPGP

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 08:51:19PM +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Jan-Oliver Wagner <jan@intevation.de> writes:
> > On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 06:51:48PM +0200, Jan Petranek wrote:
> >> My interest lies more to the issue, how implementing both (OpenPGP and
> >> S/MIME) format would effect public-key-infrastructures.
> >
> > in the first instance it can't have an effect on pki.
> > pki with OpenPGP and S/MIME are two separate worlds.
> 
> There's no reason it has to be that way, I believe proprietary PGP
> implementations already support X.509 certificate syntax, so OpenPGP
> and S/MIME aren't that far away from each other.

I more thought of the philosophy pkis can work (strictly
hierarchical or distributed) and the question for what
purposes they actually should be used in our society/economy?

> > It is far beyond the scope of Ägypten to develop concepts
> > for combining pki approaches behind OpenPGP and S/MIME.
> > Perhaps we can convince authorities to invest in
> > neutral research towards sensible pki :-)
> 
> Well, if Ägypten have a sensible framework that allows for both
> OpenPGP and S/MIME, the authorities might see that this was a good
> idea and help the effort.

Imo more research on the potential ways and benefits of pki
needs to be undertaken at the same time.
On technical side, a free software pki package that
is easy to install and use is currently missing (afaik).
Authorties should contract the development of such
to improve peoples understanding of pki in general.

Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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