Subject: [saag] PLASMA BOF summary for IETF 80

From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:41:46 +0200

PLASMA BOF was held on Tuesday afternoon. Its goal is to move various S/MIME policy
enforcement related logic from MUAs to a policy server, which has some nice side effects
like allowing non X.509-based authentication (e.g. SAML based) from MUAs to the policy
server, as well as message revocation before the message is read and changes to the list
of intended recipients once in transit.

Despite some original concerns that that work is only of interest to a limited
group of people, the BOF was well attended and there was active participation in
the dicussion of related use cases.

Some interest was expressed to use ABFAB-capable solution together with the policy server.

One AD has expressed concerns of why sending secure email can't be done using just
websites (without SMTP at all), so that there is no need to use S/MIME.
Proponents answered that users still like to use email for many tasks, so building upon/
fixing existing secure email is a desired goal.

At the end of the BOF several participants (in addition to the BOF proponents)
expressed their desire to work on something in this space. Several people were also
interested in use of the proposed architecture for non email cases (e.g. with XMPP or
for website access controls). As there was no strong consensus that a working group
was to be formed, the proposed charter was not discussed.  This will be done on
the mailing list at an appropriate time.

Paul & Alexey, BOF co-chairs.