RFC 2015 (rfc2015) - Page 1 of 8

MIME Security with Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)

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Network Working Group                                          M. Elkins
Request for Comments: 2015                     The Aerospace Corporation
Category: Standards Track                                   October 1996


              MIME Security with Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)

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.

Abstract

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

1.  Introduction

   Previous work on integrating PGP with MIME (including the since
   withdrawn application/pgp content type) has suffered from a number of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.  This work 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 is styled after RFC 1848, which defines MIME Object Security
   Services (MOSS) for providing security and authentication.

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

1.1  Compliance

   In order for an implementation to be compliant with this
   specification, is it absolutely necessary for it to obey all items
   labeled as MUST or REQUIRED.








Elkins                      Standards Track
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