Subject: Time to dump X.400 support?

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 12:25:36 -0400

Looking at the extreme breach of trust by US govt re PRISM, I think it is
time to do something we should have done decades ago but were stopped at US
Govt request.

Lets kill all support for X.400 mail.

This is still in use, I know. But looking through the PKIX spec the schema
is ten pages long. I count seven pages of garbage that we could kill if we
abandoned support for X.400, garbage character sets no longer needed, bogus
time formats, etc. etc.

Certificates do not need to be as complicated as X.509v3 made them. To work
with certificates issued for the Internet, an application needs to support
only 20% of the PKIX schema at most.

-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/

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From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:30:17 -0400

> Lets kill all support for X.400 mail. 

+1000.

We should do this because nobody new is going to use it.
The other reasons you mentioned are just icing.

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works

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From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 20:19:18 +0100

Phill,

> only 20% of the PKIX schema at most.

Sure, if we went back to the late 1990's that'd have been worth doing.
And sure, if we re-invent rfc 5280 public key certs we can not include
some stuff. Not that I see much benefit in re-inventing 5280 PKCs as a
thing to do in and of itself. (And of course DANE includes hardly any
ASN.1 nonsense if you pick the right options so we already have an
option without that baggage.)

But I see no benefit in messing around with rfc 5280 at this stage for
fun. (I said the same to the ITU-T person who seems to want to do that
with their x.509 spec the other day when the topic came up on wpkops.)

So -1 to that kind of change unless there's a much better reason.

S.

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From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 22:26:45 -0400

> So -1 to that kind of change unless there's a much better reason.

I wasn't thinking so much of re-opening RFC5280 as declaring them obsolete
with the intention to remove them in future editions should those ever
occur.

Perhaps of more immediate effect, can we revisit the issue of OCSP
responders having to report 'VALID' for a non existent certificate?

Every one of the people who objected is a US government contractor and the
only party that purportedly has a difficulty with the idea that an OCSP
responder should be able to provide a definitive statement is the US DoD.

As I pointed out in the wake of FLAME, this particular change would have
made it easier to detect the type of attack performed on Microsoft in the
FLAME malware.

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From: Dave Cridland <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 10:29:34 +0100

> Lets kill all support for X.400 mail.
Actually, as far as I'm aware, the US and UK government uses of X.400 are
being phased out fairly rapidly, so they'd probably support trimming out
most of the support from PKIX too.

> Certificates do not need to be as complicated as X.509v3 made them. To
> work with certificates issued for the Internet, an application needs to
> support only 20% of the PKIX schema at most.
>
>
I'd be interested to see a more concrete proposal. I would offer my
apps-oriented viewpoint in the work, too.

Dave.