RFC 3156 (rfc3156) - Page 1 of 15

MIME Security with OpenPGP

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Network Working Group                                          M. Elkins
Request for Comments: 3156                      Network Associates, Inc.
Updates: 2015                                               D. Del Torto
Category: Standards Track                        CryptoRights Foundation
                                                               R. Levien
                                    University of California at Berkeley
                                                             T. Roessler
                                                             August 2001


                       MIME Security with OpenPGP

Status of this Memo

   This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
   Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
   improvements.  Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
   Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
   and status of this protocol.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

   This document describes how the OpenPGP Message Format can be used to
   provide privacy and authentication using the Multipurpose Internet
   Mail Extensions (MIME) security content types described in RFC 1847.

1.  Introduction

   Work on integrating PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) with MIME [3]
   (including the since withdrawn "application/pgp" content type) prior
   to RFC 2015 suffered from a number of problems, the most significant
   of which is the inability to recover signed message bodies without
   parsing data structures specific to PGP.  RFC 2015 makes use of the
   elegant solution proposed in RFC 1847, which defines security
   multipart formats for MIME.  The security multiparts clearly separate
   the signed message body from the signature, and have a number of
   other desirable properties.  This document revises RFC 2015 to adopt
   the integration of PGP and MIME to the needs which emerged during the
   work on the OpenPGP specification.

   This document defines three content types for implementing security
   and privacy with OpenPGP: "application/pgp-encrypted",
   "application/pgp-signature" and "application/pgp-keys".




Elkins, et al.              Standards Track
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