Why is the IETF resisting S/MIME?
The IETF likes to develop designs by committee and then standardize them, and they’re generally not amenable to having someone propose something and have them bless it. SSL, which was developed by Netscape, is largely viewed as a sort of victory over this mentality because they are probably going to standardize it, albeit with a few changes, including changing the name from SSL to TLS. But even now, there are proposed additional changes that could make it incompatible with everything that’s out there. What’s really going on? The motivation has to do with patents. This September, the first major patent on a public key cryptographic algorithm expired — the Diffie-Hellman key agreement patent. RSA’s competing patent expires on Sept. 20, 2000. Historically, the terms to license RSA have been and continue to be expensive, whereas the terms to license Diffie-Hellman are now free. So, the IETF wants to standardize all the protocols on the Diffie-Hellman suite and disenfranchise the RSA paten
