CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Steve Kent/BBN PEM Minutes The Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) Working Group, Chaired by Steve Kent (BBN) met for the first time at the Atlanta IETF meeting. The Working Group met on Monday and Tuesday afternoon and both sessions were well attended. The purpose of these sessions was to discuss unresolved issues related to the Internet drafts which describe PEM processing and the proposed PEM key management system. The goal of this meeting was to reach consensus on these issues so that revised Internet Drafts could be issued and the Internet Drafts could progress to RFCs. A number of the issues which populated the meeting agenda were articulated in postings to the PEM mailing list in previous weeks. During the first session progress was made in resolving an issue related to PEM message processing details and John Linn (the editor of the relevant Internet Draft) agreed to make the necessary edits to this Internet Draft. There also appeared to be consensus on how to accommodate, in an orderly fashion, a growing list of distinguished name attributes in PEM certificates. The proposal was made to register such attributes, for use in all Internet applications which make use of distinguished name, in the periodic IANA RFCs. Other issues regarding public key management for PEM were discussed including: o The role of RSADSI in the certification process, o Constraints on cross-certification, and o Representation of object class identification in certificates. However, consensus was not achieved in the discussion of these issues and other contentious topics associated with the key management Internet Draft were not addressed due to insufficient time over both days of the PEM Working Group sessions. During the Tuesday afternoon session RSADSI presented proposed organization and user registration procedures and corresponding legal documents. Copies of the organizational agreement were not available for distribution at the time of the meeting. RSADSI also described the proposed agreement for distributing source code for the RSA cryptosystem as part of a freely available, Internet implementation of PEM. Because some aspects of this agreement are involved with unresolved issues as cited above, finalization of the agreement details, etc., will require resolution of these issues. As a result of the lack of progress at these Working Group meetings, an 1 interim meeting was proposed (later in the week) for September 11th at BBN in Cambridge, MA. This Working Group also expects to convene again in November at the next IETF meeting. Attendees Doug Barlow barlow@decwet.dec.com Jim Bidzos jim@rsa.com David Bolen db3l@nis.ans.net Nelson Bolyard nelson@sqi.com Mats Brunell mats.brunell@sics.se Vinton Cerf vcerf@nri.reston.va.us Stephen Crocker crocker@tis.com Steve Dusse spock@rsa.com Jeffrey Edelheit edelheit@mitre.org James Ellis jte@cert.sei.cmu.edu Barbara Fraser byf@cert.sei.cmu.edu Deborah Futcher dfutche@eco.twg.com Maria Gallagher maria@nsipo.arc.nasa.gov James Galvin galvin@tis.com Joe Godsil jgodsil@ncsa.uiuc.edu William Griffeth billg@usl.com Steve Hardcastle-Kille S.Kille@cs.ucl.ac.uk Alton Hoover hoover@nis.ans.net Neil Katin katin@eng.sun.com Charles Kaufman kaufman@dsmail.enet.dec.com Stephen Kent kent@bbn.com Vincent Lau vincent.lau@eng.sun.com John Linn linn@zendia.enet.dec.com David Lippke lippke@utdallas.edu Jack Liu liu@koala.enet.dec.com Louis Mamakos louie@ni.umd.edu Ellen McDermott emcd@osf.org April Merrill abmerri@tycho.ncsc.mil Paul Mockapetris pvm@darpa.mil Clifford Neuman bcn@isi.edu Richard Parker rp@mbunix.mitre.org P. Rajaram rajaram@sun.com Michael Reilly reilly@nsl.dec.com Jeffrey Schiller jis@mit.edu Aaron Schuman schuman@sgi.com Ron Sharp rls@neptune.att.com Robert Shirey shirey@mitre.org Mark Stein marks@eng.sun.com Ronald Tencati tencati@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov Theodore Tso tytso@mit.edu Brian Yasaki bky@eco.twg.com Peter Yee yee@ames.arc.nasa.gov 2