Subject: Re: Last Call: draft-gennai-smime-cnipa-pec (Certified Electrinic Mail) to Proposed Standard

From: Alfred Hönes <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:48:45 +0200 (MESZ)

All,

The I-D under LC, draft-gennai-smime-cnipa-pec, looks like a
_first-class_ (counter-)example suitable to be fed into the IAB
document "Uncoordinated Protocol Development Considered Harmful"
(yet it's too late -- that's already shipped to the RFC Editor!).
In this context, the provenance of the reported national standard
would be regarded as an SDO without liaison to the IETF.

draft-gennai-smime-cnipa-pec contains so many violations of
existing standards and tries to establish extensions in ways
explicitely not foreseen in the Internet email standards that
it actually should not appear on the IETF stream *at all*.

It might be considered as an Informational document for the
Independent Submission Stream, and there it would perhaps be one
of the exceptional cases I have referred to recently [1] on this
list, where a *huge* IESG Note would perhaps be appropriate,
stating that this memo is a subject of instruction on how protocol
extensions to IETF Standards by other standards organizations
should NOT be done.

Another surprising observation can be made by looking into the IETF
Datatracker at the URL given in the Last Call announcement [2]:

The draft has entered the Status Tracker in status "Publication
Requested" at the same day LC has been requested and issued as well.
Usually, the AD starts taking a closer look at a document aiming
at Standards Track, entering it into the Tracker in state
"AD is Watching", and later accepts a publication request,
most likely after having performed his AD review of the document
and -- if necessary -- having obtained applicable area directorate
reviews.
I've never seen a document suggested for PS where the AD apparently
has started watching, performed his review, accepted the
publication request, and triggered IETF Last Call at the same day.

A full IETF Tools / Google search of the SMIME archive has revealed
only a few comments on the -00 draft version, pointing out
intrinsic issues of PEC and/or its description in the draft, and an
implementer's view.
There has not been any discussion of the properties of the protocol
and/or its relationship to existing Internet standards.
Isn't such discussion a pre-requirement for PS?
I strongly assume the the quoted presentation at IETF 71 did not
reveal the level of detail that would have enabled the audience
to become aware of the conflicts with the Standards.

Sorry for having to be politically incorrect:  This all reminds me
 in a disastrous manner of the deranged relation of some political
 leadership (of the country where the draft originates from)
 to law and democratic separation of powers that can be found
 described in the News these days.   :-(

So my recommendation simply is:  Cancel LC; back to square one!

[1]
http://www.IETF.ORG/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg59026.html

[2]
https://datatracker.ietf.org/idtracker/draft-gennai-smime-cnipa-pec/

Kind regards,
  Alfred Hönes.

-- 

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