Subject: which usercertificate attribute

From: Thierry Van Doninck <[email-masked]>
Date: 06 Apr 2000 14:34:37 +0200

Hi,

When I use Netscape Communicator as a mail client, I can 'get' the certificates of my correspondents from a ldap directory.
Netscape however looks for a userSMIMEcertificate instead of a userCertificate.

Which is the correct attribute to publish Certificates in ?
I would think that using 1 certificate for all applications would be a lot more user friendly.

I only have one physical passport, why would I need several digital one's ?

Thierry
eMail : [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Terry Hayes)
Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2000 08:00:30 -0700

> I would think that using 1 certificate for all applications would be a lot more user friendly.

The userSMIMEcertificate attribute contains additional information about the SMIME recipient, in particular the preferred
encryption algorithms.  Without this information, the message sender has to guess what algorithms would be acceptable.  This is
why Communicator used userSMIMEcertificate.

More recent versions of SMIME support for Communicator (in particular the PSM security add-on) supports retrieval of the
certificates from both attributes in the directory.  In addition, PSM has support for automatically retrieving certificates
from your primary directory (address book) without manual intervention.

Terry Hayes
[email-masked]