LYNX-DEV project: User Certificate support for Lynx

[Bruce R. Lewis]

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>.

-- 
(define (b l) (display (string-append (make-string (- 40 (quotient
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  "MIT Information Systems" "<URL:http://web.mit.edu/brlewis/www/>"))
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