Re: LYNX-DEV project: User Certificate support for Lynx

[Bruce R. Lewis]

Just want to let lynx-dev know that work has started on this project; If
you want to give input, speak now.

"Bruce R. Lewis" <address@hidden> writes:

> Lynx-dev folks,
> 
> My understanding of the current state of affairs re. SSL and lynx is
> that Fote has patches to support SSL for encryption but not
> authentication, and that there's a daemon available that does SSL with a
> limited form of certificate support, but won't provide a user with all
> the certificate management capability of, say, Netscape Navigator.
> 
> Authentication via SSL and X.509 certificates is increasingly important
> to MIT.  For this reason I am supervising a student programmer this
> summer who will implement certificate support in Lynx.  I definitely
> want this work to be shared as widely as possible, and would like to
> collaborate with lynx-dev to ensure that the code produced by this
> project is acceptable to those actively maintaining lynx.
> 
> Don't take this as legal counsel because I'm not a lawyer, but
> authentication code is exportable, unlike encryption code, so this work
> could go into the main distribution with appropriate #ifdefs.  Any part
> of the work that doesn't fall in this category would hopefully be
> incorporated into Fote's patches.
> 
> I would like someone to represent lynx-dev by enumerating requirements
> for code to be integrated into the main lynx distribution.  Who would
> best fill this role?
> 
> My work-in-progress documentation of this project can be found at
> <URL:http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/FY97/lynx-cert/main/main.html>.

-- 
Bruce R. Lewis                  <address@hidden>
MIT Information Systems         <URL:http://web.mit.edu/brlewis/www/>
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