Subject: Protocol Action: 'Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) Version 3.2 Certificate Handling' to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 13:44:40 -0700 (PDT)

The IESG has approved the following document:

- 'Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) Version 3.2 
   Certificate Handling '
   <draft-ietf-smime-3850bis-11.txt> as a Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the S/MIME Mail Security Working Group. 

The IESG contact persons are Tim Polk and Pasi Eronen.

A URL of this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-smime-3850bis-11.txt

Technical Summary

     This document specifies the conventions for X.509 certificates
     for use with S/MIME agents. It is the third update of the S/MIME
     Certificate Handling specification (aka S/MIME CERT v3.2) and it
     will obsolete RFC 3850, when approved.  Note that Annex A
     recommends moving RFC2312, which is S/MIME CERT v2, to historic
     status.

Working Group Summary

     The majority of the S/MIME WG discussion was on what key sizes
     and which algorithms to support.  The initial proposal included
     ECC algorithms as SHOULDs, but they were removed.  After removal
     of the ECC algorithms, the S/MIME WG quickly reached a concensus
     on the algorithms. The key size discussion had two camps "go big"
     and "be realistic".  The rough consensus is somewhere in the
     middle and is supported by widely deployed implementations.

Document Quality

     S/MIME has numerous implementations. In fact, many implementations
     already support the algorithms and key sizes specied in this
     document, with the exception of RSA-PSS.

Personnel

     Russ Housley is the document Shepherd.
     Tim Polk is the responsible Security Area AD.