[ih] The Internet Plan; was: Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[John Linn]

I edited RFC-989 and some successor documents on the PEM side of the 
fence, and have no way of
knowing whether/when PEM results might have influenced PGP.  Note, 
however, that RFC-989 didn't
include PEM's PKI aspect; rather, it emphasized the message processing 
layer (e.g., defining the Printable Encoding that was subsequently 
adapted as MIME's base64).  That layer was intended for
use either with PKI or pairwise symmetric keys, and both types of 
implementations were prototyped.  I don't believe the certification 
infrastructure was documented in RFC form until RFC-1114, in August 1989.

FWIW (perhaps already historic, after < 24 hours), I attempted to post 
the following paragraph to the list,
but it seems to have dropped silently, perhaps because of a sender 
address mismatch:

"S/MIME succeeded PEM, extending and generalizing the message-level 
content protection facilities, but its availability also didn't trigger 
deployment of broadly-adopted user certification infrastructure.  Absent 
such infrastructure, email security suffers from a significant first 
phone effect; there's little incentive to begin using it until and 
unless your communicating peers do so as well, which isn't likely to 
happen unless many members of a community develop interest in parallel. 
This hasn't yet taken place at anywhere near a general and pervasive 
level, but the reason may have more to do with user demand than with 
availability of technology.  S/MIME support has been widely available in 
email clients for many years, but may also be one of the Internet's 
best-deployed examples of latent, unexecuted code."

--jl

On 02/16/2011 12:51 PM, Dave CROCKER wrote:
>
>> This was years before PGP (which of course appeared in part as a 
>> counterpoint
>> to PEM, since the top-down authentication model of PEM didn't sit 
>> well with
>> everyone).
>
>
> FWIW, I suspect Phil did not know about PEM.  A couple of histories 
> about PGP don't mention the connection, plus Phil was not in the IETF 
> mix:
>
> <http://library.thinkquest.org/27158/concept2_7_2.html>
>
> Note the 1991 date.
>
> RFC 989, defining PEM, is dated 1987.  Still the odds are good that 
> PEM did not motivate PGP.
>
> d/