RFC 3156 (rfc3156) - Page 1 of 15
MIME Security with OpenPGP
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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(including the since withdrawn "application/pgp" content type) prior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