*HEPKI-TAG S/MIME Conference Call* 20-June-2002 *Attendees* Jim Jokl, U. Virginia (Co-chair) Bob Brentrup, Dartmouth (Co-chair) Gary Chapman, NYU Omen Wild, NYU Stephen Wadlow, Tufts Eric Norman, UW-Madison Judith Boettcher, CREN Chris Misra, U. Mass Michael Gettes, Georgetown Steve Olshansky, Internet2 Jeanette Fielden, Internet2 *Discussion* SYMPA is a mailing list manager developed by CRU, the French Universities Network Committee. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2. It is written in Perl. It has the functionality of other mailing systems plus it is directory-enabled and has S/MIME capabilities. SYMPA can verify S/MIME signatures, and supports dynamic includes of email addresses from a source that can be either a relational database accepting SQL queries or an LDAP directory. If you have a certificate for the list server you can send a message to that certificate and it will be distributed to the list enrollees encrypted with their respective certs. It keeps its own certificate database. It can do list control with S/MIME signed messages, or a web interface that recognizes the certificate. It also handles multiple CAs. It is highly customizable and it appears that all behavior can be modified through simple text file changes. One possible problem is: it is not clear that the software can handle encrypted S/MIME signatures. There was discussion of how SYMPA might be modified to support pulling the certificates from directories instead and handling encryption when not every list member can handle it. The SYMPA web site is http://www.sympa.org/. There were discussions with some of the developers of SYMPA at the TERENA meeting in Ireland related to how SYMPA could be extended. It needs greater LDAP enablement to do operations such as wherever you would normally have an e-mail address you should be able to specify an URI. A bank of mailing list servers could all key off the same directory information, which would allow distributing the mailing list processing among multiple servers. Bridge enabling for inter-domain mailing list processing would mean that not all certificates have to be in each SYMPA deployment to have it work properly. The SYMPA developers are interested in ongoing discussions and information exchange on these topics. [AI] 20-June-2002 (Everyone) - Please e-mail ideas and lists of open issues relating to S/MIME to the list. *School Updates* A report on the S/MIME study at Wisconsin is not available yet. It will hopefully be distributed soon. U. Mass - Currently awaiting the arrival of some expected equipment. Tufts - has made some progress on the certificate management system. They’re still waiting on some hardware to arrive. There is a machine with nCipher installed that may be used to see how nCipher performs (http://www.ncipher.com/) NYU - currently installing the iPlanet CMS server. Dartmouth - The web group is sending signed messages back and forth internally. The issue has been getting acceptance of the Dartmouth certs into the cache. Some new materials have been added to the S/MIME page and work is starting on documentation aimed at students. The next call for S/MIME will be on the 18th of July. *Action Items* [AI] 20-June-2002 (Everyone) - Please e-mail ideas and lists of open issues relating to S/MIME to the list.