Subject: Protocol Action: MIME Security with OpenPGP to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 16:52:04 -0400

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'MIME Security with OpenPGP'
<draft-ietf-openpgp-mime-07.txt> as a Proposed Standard.  This document
is the product of the An Open Specification for Pretty Good Privacy
Working Group.  The IESG contact persons are Jeffrey Schiller and
Marcus Leech.

Technical Summary
 
This document defines a MIME encapsulation for the OpenPGP Message
Format. It is an update of RFC2015 taking into account lessons learned
during the deployment of RFC2015 based systems. Security protocols
provide a unique challenge for MIME based systems. Specifically it
must be ensured that the binary representation of a message is not
altered by a MIME aware gateway. Modification, if present will always
break any provided digital signatures. Yet the obvious mechanism to
ensure this in MIME is to encode the message in such a fashion that it
is not human readable. This document defines how to best protect a
message from unwanted modification while at the same time managing to
keep the actual message format human readable.

Working Group Summary

The working group came to consensus on this document.

Protocol Quality

Jeffrey I. Schiller reviewed this protocol for the IETF.