[ncc-services-wg] E-mail Client Testing for S/MIME Compliance

Dear Grzegorz,

In total I spent about four weeks doing the research on mail clients, 
installing and configuring them, testing them and preparing the report. But 
this was spread over a slightly longer period.

The implementation including preparing detailed design documents, code changes, 
writing new test cases for our comprehensive regression testing of dbupdate and 
running the tests will take a similar amount of time.

The time to implement this feature is independent of the report. The reason we 
spent the time on the report is to address the concerns of some members who 
wanted to know how widespread the use of this technology is.

We would also like to point out that this is not a 'static' document. There are 
many other mail clients used by some members. It is not practical for the RIPE 
NCC to test them all. The actual tests are quite quick, but the time consuming 
part is installing and configuring them. Our first aim was to test some of the 
most commonly used clients, then secondly to ensure that there was at least a 
choice of mail clients available on each of the three platforms we used. This 
second point is why we did not just take the 'top ten' mail clients from the 
list. But we are hoping that some members will do further testing on other mail 
clients and feed the results back to the RIPE NCC and we will update the 
document. Perhaps along with the results some details of any installation 
options and configuration details needed to enable S/MIME can also be included.

Regards,

-- 
Denis Walker
Software Engineering Department
RIPE NCC

Grzegorz BRZESKI wrote:
>>At the RIPE 45 Meeting a proposal was presented to implement an additional
> 
> form
> 
>>of strong authentication for protecting objects in the RIPE Database and
> 
> to
> 
>>allow for secure communication by e-mail with the RIPE NCC. This
> 
> implementation
> 
>>uses the X.509 certificates. A question was raised by some members about
> 
> how
> 
>>widespread is the compliance of S/MIME within mail clients. The RIPE NCC
>>Software Engineering Department has undertaken a study to evaluate the use
> 
> of
> 
>>S/MIME by mail clients.
> 
> 
> Just a quick question, how many man hours did it take to get this study done
> and compile the report ? How much time would it take on the other hand to
> implement this _additional_ form of strong authentication without the report
> ?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> --
> Grzegorz BRZESKI