Subject: Protocol Action: 'Trust Anchor Format' to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2009 03:00:19 -0800 (PST)

The IESG has approved the following document:

- 'Trust Anchor Format '
   <draft-ietf-pkix-ta-format-04.txt> as a Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Public-Key Infrastructure (X.509) 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-pkix-ta-format-04.txt

Technical Summary

  This document describes a structure for representing trust anchor
  information.  A trust anchor is an authoritative entity represented
  by a public key and associated data.  The public key is used to
  verify digital signatures and the associated data is used to
  constrain the types of information or actions for which the trust
  anchor is authoritative.  The structures defined in this document are
  intended to satisfy the format-related requirements defined in Trust
  Anchor Management Requirements.

Working Group Summary

  This document entered the working group following the Trust Anchor
  Management BOF.  Initially, the contents were includes in the Trust
  Anchor Management (TAMP) I-D, which presented trust anchor format
  and trust anchor management protocol specifications in a single
  document.  The working group favored separate documents for protocol 
  specification and format specification. This I-D contains the latter. 
The 
  draft was not particularly controversial, but a number of significant 
  changes resulted from working group discussion, including support 
  for additional formats.

  There was one noteworthy issue raised that did not result in any 
  change in the document.  It has been noted that the ta-format has
  some overlap with the ETSI Trust Status List which is specified 
  in ETSI TS 102 231, although the goals of each specification are
  significantly different.  The wg briefly debated whether some
  comparison of the two schemes should be included.  In the end, 
  the wg decided that TSL need not be addressed.

Document Quality

  The document is well-written and clear. I have been told that there 
  is an open source implementation in progress.  The most common 
  format used to represent a trust anchor today is a self-signed 
  certificate and this format is accommodated in this standard.

Personnel

   Steve Kent is the Document Shepherd for this document.
   Tim Polk is the Responsible Area Director.

RFC Editor Note

In section 2.4, please make the following substitution:

OLD
When taTitleLangTag is absent, English is used.
NEW
When taTitleLangTag is absent, English ("en" language tag) is used.