Digital Signatures

Chris,

First of all, let me welcome you and PenOp to the W3C.  I hope you will be
able to join us at our Advisory Committee meeting in Toronto on May 10 &
11.  See

http://www.w3.org/Member/Meeting/99AC/

for details of the meeting and a link to the registration.

I imagine your new membership at this time is not entirely coincidental.  I
expect you are aware that we have just run a workshop on digital signatures
in XML.  There is a rather active mailing list that has developed as a
result of the meeting.  You can examine the archive at

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-xml-sig-ws/

In case you haven't heard, your system has been the subject of considerable
discussion.  Much of that discussion, in my opinion, is based on
considerable ignorance and speculation of just what your system does.
Since I now have your URL, I took the opportunity to read the description at
 
http://www.penop.com/penop/penop.nsf/htmlmedia/security.html

Unfortunately, it lacks sufficient detail for me to understand just how the
document hash and the act of signing are tied together inextricably.

We are in the process of trying to develop a specification for representing
as large a variety of digital signature methodologies as possible.  I hope
you will be able to review the mailing list archive and get a flavor of the
kinds of questions floating around.

I look forward to your active participation in the proposed working group
that ensues from this workshop.

Alan
___________________________________________________________________________
Alan Kotok, Associate Chairman                          mailto:kotok@w3.org
World Wide Web Consortium                                 http://www.w3.org
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science,  545 Technology Square,  Room NE43-409
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA     Voice: +1-617-258-5728    Fax: +1-617-258-5999

Received on Friday, 30 April 1999 18:26:38 UTC