Mobile XKMS clients

Although we don't spell it out explicitly in the Requirements document,
it is obviously implied that XKMS applications MUST have the ability to parse XML data.
This poses a problem for extremely constrained clients (such as cell phones and
smart cards) that do not have general-purpose XML parsers available to them - or SOAP
processors for that matter - (because of memory constraints).
I have always assumed that one of the (most) compelling use cases for XKMS is for mobile devices,
such as cell phones, which are not capable of building and validating cert chains, etc.
Although this assumption is not explicitly stated in our documents, it shows up on the XML Trust
Center site under "Benefits of XKMS" - i.e.
"Ideal for mobile devices: XKMS allow mobile devices to access full-featured PKI through
ultra-minimal-footprint client device interfaces."

If one of our goals is to support constrained devices at the scale of cell phones and smart cards,
then the current spec falls short of that goal.

My questions to the group:
When we talk about supporting mobile devices, are we including cell phones and smart cards as
such devices? Has anyone thought about implementation issues with respect to this? Do we
need to add text indicating that providing support for applications without general-purpose
XML parsers is out of scope?

Regards,
Yassir.

Received on Monday, 25 February 2002 16:30:57 UTC