I sent this yesterday, but it apparently didn't through. --

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I don't have an answer to your question, but you did bring up something I've been meaning to ask about for some time and I never really got around to it; Are there any short-term plans to press for an RFC utilizing digital signatures? With the exponential increase of mail

Existing standards track RFCs support PEM-based security of RFC-822 email (RFC 1421, RFC 1422, RFC 1423, and RFC 1424). Recent work on security of MIME has allowed for an alternative content protection and certification mechanism (i.e. PGP). See Internet Drafts draft-ietf-pem-sigenc-02.txt and draft-ietf-pem-mime-07.txt which respectively define the framework and the PEM-specific parts.

The best answer that I can come up with for this problem is to allow for several webs of trust to function simultaneously. Perhaps we would have

The intent of the MIME extensions is to enable either PGP or PEM to be used, although the standard for the former is I believe still pending. I am not aware of efforts to integrate the two certification mechanisms.

A web could be defined by a single top-level public key and a set of

This is the function for the IPRA (as discussed in RFC 1422).

rules. Perhaps a text based program -- a sort of "meta-pgp" -- could check chains of signatures to validate a key.

This is what a PEM-conformant user agent does.

Suppose, for example, that I'm administering a web of trust. I set up the web so that I can deputize notaries who can in turn sign user keys.

The PEM WG used to call these organisational notaries, but they have been dropped from the standards. They are also referred to in related work as Local Registration Agents or Authorities - and are necessary for large organisations' use of certification services.

Lets further assume that all signatures are good for a year. A keyserver would return a text file containing: (a) the user's key, concated with a notary's key, concated with a header specifiying the date it was singed by me.

This sounds similar to the certification message in RFC 1424. There isn't a requirement for certificate retrieval as certificates are sent with the message or handled using (as yet unspecified) directory facilities - probably an extended DNS in the Internet environment. - pvm