At 10:37 AM 3/15/96 -6, Peter Trei wrote:
Spry Mosaic really does support SHTTP - you can use it to connect to the SHTTP test pages at Terisa and Commercenet without difficulty, once you've doped out how to generate and get signed a low-assurance RSA persona certificate.
After I posted about it, I did a little more digging and checked out the S-HTTP portion of the code. Seems to work pretty well. (I was a bit surprised to see that the Personna cert generation saved the information off in a text file, instead of using the bundled e-mail client. The docs on this process were pretty sketchy as well...)
I just performed an altavista search for references to "shttp://" (the SHTTP prefix) and "https://" (the SSL prefix). The results were 1,000 SHTTP hits, and 20,000 SSL hits.
SHTTP may be technicly superior to SSL level 2.0, but as a commercial software developer, I know on which side my bread is buttered.
My reasons for installing it had little to do with S-HTTP (but it was a nice bonus) and more to do with the lack of table support. (I needed something to check out how pages would look on non-table supporting browsers.) My concerns with S-HTTP are with the lack of server (and browser) software support for it, as well as the difficulty of maintaining a site that uses it. (Having to change every single page on a site can become a bit of a chore, as well as introduce unintended security holes due to in improperly updated page.) --- Alan Olsen -- alano@teleport.com -- Contract Web Design & Instruction `finger -l alano@teleport.com` for PGP 2.6.2 key http://www.teleport.com/~alano/ "We had to destroy the Internet in order to save it." - Sen. Exon