RSA Blows Smoke

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Wierd News
RSA Blows Standards Smoke
James Glave james@wired.com"
6:16pm 31.Oct.97.PST
http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/8196.html


Today's announcement "http://www.rsa.com/smimelive/html/9710311.html" by
RSA Data Security stating that the company has formally applied to the
Internet Engineering Task Force to establish an email security standard is
a blatant lie rooted in greed, allege sources close to the process.

"RSA is lying, and I am really livid," said Paul Hoffman of the Internet
Mail Coalition. "RSA has not submitted anything."

The flap centers around the company's ongoing efforts to get its
proprietary S/MIME email encryption technology endorsed as a standard by
the task force. Such an endorsement would give the company credibility,
and potentially, an increased market share over rival Pretty Good Privacy.
PGP submitted a competing protocol for standards consideration last month.

The Internet standards process is lengthy and complicated at best. The
sticking point in RSA's efforts to date is that the task force will only
consider non-proprietary technologies for the standards track. But S/MIME
2, the protocol at the heart of the effort, includes core RSA technologies
that must be licensed.

To be considered for standardization, RSA must relinquish "change
control," or the ability to modify the technology, to the task force. And
the portion the task force is most interested in altering is the portion
that requires RSA technology. As a result, getting change control "has
been like pulling teeth," claims Jeff Schiller, the organization's
security director. 

"Their goal has always been get this into the IETF but don't really give
up control," said Schiller. "[They want to] make sure that when the
standard comes down, if an anyone wants to implement it then they have to
be a licensee."

Schiller says that until change control is secured, RSA has no hope of
coming near a formal application - as they had claimed to have already
done this morning. RSA, however, claims that it has granted change
control.

"They are trying to get more market share by claiming that the IETF is
endorsing their commercial product," alleged Schiller.

RSA, in fact, is only one of five groups that have worked on S/MIME 2,
which is about to be submitted by the Internet Mail Coalition to the IETF
as an informational request for comments. Now, in order to retain its hold
on the S/MIME technology, RSA is taking sole credit for submitting it to
the task force, some observers claim.

"It's totally disacknowledging the work of a lot of other people," said
Hoffman. A request for comments is one of the initial steps in the
certification process, and Hoffman says that the Internet Mail Coalition
has yet to put S/MIME 2 forward.

Further, Schiller says, "When we do, it is not trying to get it as an
Internet standard. It won't go - and therefore we are not going to try."

Hoffman reiterated that S/MIME 2 won't be an Internet standard because it
relies on proprietary security technology and weak encryption. The
Internet Mail Coalition is about to begin work on S/MIME 3, which will use
stronger encryption and true open standards.

Tim Matthews, product manager for RSA, acknowledged that the announcement
may be open to misinterpretation. "It's basically a summation of all the
work we've been doing over the past month," he said.

Instead of helping its own cause, and gaining public mindshare, RSA's
announcement may end up flying back in its face.

"If it fragments the S/MIME camp it could help PGP a bit," said Charles
Breed, director of technology for competitor PGP.

"I hope [the announcement] hasn't sunk their chances because there are
still a lot of people who want to do S/MIME," said Hoffman. "RSA's
greediness could sink this, but I really hope it doesn't."

- -- 
- ---------------------------------------------------------------
William H. Geiger III  http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html                        
- ---------------------------------------------------------------

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William Geiger <whgiii@invweb.net> forwards article:
> The Internet standards process is lengthy and complicated at
> best. The sticking point in RSA's efforts to date is that the task
> force will only consider non-proprietary technologies for the
> standards track. But S/MIME 2, the protocol at the heart of the
> effort, includes core RSA technologies that must be licensed.

No hope then, cool :-)

> RSA, in fact, is only one of five groups that have worked on S/MIME 2,
> which is about to be submitted by the Internet Mail Coalition to the IETF
> as an informational request for comments. Now, in order to retain its hold
> on the S/MIME technology, RSA is taking sole credit for submitting it to
> the task force, some observers claim.

Who worked on S/MIME 2?  How comes it's the same "Internet Mail
Coalition" that is "submitting S/MIME 2 to the IETF" as the one which
Paul Hoffman is slagging off RSA and S/MIME 2?

What version of S/MIME does netscape support?

> Hoffman reiterated that S/MIME 2 won't be an Internet standard
> because it relies on proprietary security technology and weak
> encryption. The Internet Mail Coalition is about to begin work on
> S/MIME 3, which will use stronger encryption and true open
> standards.

What's the point?  Why have two competing standards OpenPGP and S/MIME
3 -- does RSA hope that they will get some value from it?

Does S/MIME 3 have key escrow or CMR snooping support?

> "I hope [the announcement] hasn't sunk their chances because there
> are still a lot of people who want to do S/MIME," said
> Hoffman. "RSA's greediness could sink this, but I really hope it
> doesn't."

Before I heard about CMR additions to pgp5.x I would have said I do
sincerely hope RSA's greed sinks this.  (40 bit RC2/40 feh!)

I think I still do hope RSA's greed sinks S/MIME on average, but I
would be much more certain if this pgp5.x CMR thing could be resolved
satisfactorily.

Unfortunately PGP Inc have closed off dialogue on the topic --
apparent blanket ban on employee discussion of CMR.

So will the OpenPGP draft which Jon Callas dubbed "non political"
include CMR?

Adam
-- 
Now officially an EAR violation...
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

At 01:53 PM 11/2/97 GMT, Adam Back wrote:
   
   Unfortunately PGP Inc have closed off dialogue on the topic --
   apparent blanket ban on employee discussion of CMR.
   
Horsefeathers, Adam. We've been talking about this with you a lot and you
know it. We set up a mailing list to discuss it, you've received personal
phone calls, and lots of people have bent over backwards for you.

If you think you're being ignored, perhaps you should re-examine the
signal-to-noise ratio of your posts.

	Jon



-----
Jon Callas                                  jon@pgp.com
Chief Scientist                             555 Twin Dolphin Drive
Pretty Good Privacy, Inc.                   Suite 570
(415) 596-1960                              Redwood Shores, CA 94065
Fingerprints: D1EC 3C51 FCB1 67F8 4345 4A04 7DF9 C2E6 F129 27A9 (DSS)
              665B 797F 37D1 C240 53AC 6D87 3A60 4628           (RSA)

Jon Callas suggests that CMR has been discussed vigorously.  What was
the outcome?

Here's a short summary of a more secure and less politically
controversial alternative to CMR:

1. Escrow employee company use encryption keys.
2. Don't escrow employee personal use encryption keys.
3. Don't escrow employee company use signature keys.

As pgp5 packet format already supports multiple encryption sub keys
attached to signature keys, all that has to be done to support the
above is to put comments in the userID to say what purpose the keys
are for:

Jon Callas <jon@pgp.com> (personal use)
Jon Callas <jon@pgp.com> (company use)

Provide support in the business verion of the software to escrow the
company use key.  Provide support for both company use and personal
use keys.  If some companies want to disallow personal use, you might
consider adding this feature.


The above is already provided for without CMR/ARR.

CMR/ARR fields add political and security risks, so why bother?


So what is PGP Inc's position on the future of CMR?

Is it going to be phased out?

Is it going in the OpenPGP standard?

Are there any security, privacy or political objections to local
escrow?

Enciphering minds want to know...

Adam