There was a lot of energy around S/MIME. People are implementing it. Internally, it's pretty kludgely, but it does provide pretty good cryptographic services. (as an aside, my favorite kludge anecdote is the fact that X.509 certificates use an IA5 character set rather than ASCII, so that the @ in email addresses has to be represented as (a) instead).
Wow, is this true? I dont think so. The CCITT document I have (CCITT T.50) mentions that an @ sign (Commercial at) is a member of the IRV.
From what I understand IA5 basically means US ASCII.
Alex
If people are going to criticize X.509, they ought to at least get their facts straight, beginning with the difference between Printable String (standardized around the time of the IBM 1403 printer with its 48 character print chain) and some of the more extended alphabets. In particular, X.500 has been amended to include BMPString within DirectoryString, and BMPString is essentially Unicode. Now, there may be some who would argue that a 16 bit character isn't sufficient to represent every language in the galaxy (Old High Martian may have some additional requirements), but as a first approximation it should certainly good enough. And one of the virtues of ASN.1 is that a compliant implemtnation shouldn't have to be concerned with such details as the alphabet that is used. Bob Robert R. Jueneman GTE Laboratories 40 Sylvan Road Waltham, MA 02254 Jueneman@gte.com 1-617/466-2820 "The opinions expressed are my own, and may not reflect the official position of GTE, if any, on this subject."