Subject: Re: Conference call -- DER vs BER (fwd)

From: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 18:53:20 -0400

---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Thursday, September 23, 2004 16:40:26 -0500
From: Nicolas Williams <[email-masked]>
To: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Conference call -- DER vs BER

On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 06:53:01PM -0400, Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
> Once the call ends, the results will be reported on this mailing list,
> where they will be open for discussion.  It is my hope that the working
> group will then be able to quickly come to a concensus on this issue.

The conference call took place today.

We have made some progress.

specifically we concluded that there is no room for compromise on the
issue of ASN.1 encodings for the CMS objects in PKINIT.

Compromising on this issue means compromising on interoperability, which
would be unsatisfactory to the participants and, almost certainly, a
fatal flaw to the IESG.

We've therefore narrowed our choices from three to two:

 - Choice A: MUST encode DER  [and SHOULD decode BER]

 - Choice B: MUST decode BER  [and SHOULD encode DER]

For the time being we're awaiting additional information about the
degree of difficulty that implementors will have in adjusting their
current, upcoming or planned PKINIT implementations to one choice or the
other.

A second conference call has been scheduled for next week.  We hope to
settle on one direction or the other in short order, perhaps in as
little as one week.

Nico
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---------- End Forwarded Message ----------

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From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 19:45:00 -0400

Are those actually the two choices we narrowed ourselves down to?  Did
we actually agree SHOULD accept BER in the MUST encode DER case?

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From: Nicolas Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 18:50:25 -0500

> we actually agree SHOULD accept BER in the MUST encode DER case?

I don't remember us discussing the SHOULDs as much as the MUSTs.

Does this matter much?  What's wrong with being liberal in what one
accepts?

Nico
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