Subject: RE: SCVP-01

From: Paul Hoffman / VPNC <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 13:40:26 -0700

At 04:15 PM 8/30/1999 -0400, Salz, Rich wrote:
>Since this WG is based on the premise of using X509 certs, those VPN
>vendors that will never use certs (as opposed to waiting until things get
>"eaiser") are out of scope here.

Sorry for not being clearer in the previous message. All the vendors who 
don't use certs today *want to use certs*. There are no IPsec vendors that 
I know of that say "we never want to use certs". There are many who are 
saying "gee, um, we'll have that Real Soon Now".

>But the OCSP protocol doesn't need certs.  It needs a DN and two key hashes.
>Why not just define an OCSP critical extension that says "verify this cert,
>and verify up the chain as well."  The footprint for a dedicated DER parser
>that knew how to generate only those requests, and parse only well-formed
>replies, would be pretty small.
>
>Why won't that work?

As I've said earlier on this list, the OCSP protocol would have to be 
rewritten to allow this. The semantics in the protocol were purposely 
restricted not to do this. However, it is more than just rewriting OCSP and 
having it recycle at Proposed Standard. SCVP has many features in the 
request and response that give much more granularity than what you propose, 
as well as other features such as passing back the information needed by a 
client to validate.

If it's desired, we could eliminate some features from SCVP to make it 
simpler, possibly simple enough to fit inside an OCSP extension.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium