[JDEV] XMPP implementation questions

[Joe Hildebrand]

(in my role as Jabber-Net dev... NOT speaking for Jabber, Inc.)

I'll probably do what you expected... TLS is close (except for Start-TLS,
which is coming soon), and SASL is on the way (mostly waiting on a compliant
server implementation to test against).

I'm unlikely to add support for the e2e spec, until and unless pretty much
*everyone* else did it first.  :)

If I had to implement one, I suspect S/MIME might be easier, since I have
some existing libraries for that (at least in theory).

-- 
Joe Hildebrand

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Saint-Andre [mailto:stpeter at jabber.org] 
> Sent: Monday, July 28, 2003 5:04 PM
> To: jdev at jabber.org
> Subject: [JDEV] XMPP implementation questions
> 
> At the recent IETF meeting, I was asked to follow up with the 
> Jabber developer community about obstacles (or resistance) to 
> implementing certain aspects of the XMPP specs 
> (<http://www.jabber.org/ietf/>). The IETF folks perceive the 
> presence of an active developer community as a Good Thing 
> [tm], so I think they are interested in how likely it is that 
> the current developer community will implement the specs as written.
> 
> The main topics mentioned to me relate to security, 
> specifically SASL for authentication, TLS for channel 
> encryption, and CPIM + S/MIME for end-to-end encryption. Do 
> people think they will be able to integrate existing 
> libraries for these protocols into their applications (or 
> write their own support, as Rob Norris recently did for SASL 
> in jabberd2)? How likely is it that existing clients will 
> implement draft-ietf-xmpp-e2e, which uses CPIM and S/MIME for 
> end-to-end encryption?
> 
> From discussions so far, my sense is that SASL and TLS 
> support will be added once it's in the jabberd server, but 
> that client developers are fairly resistant to adding support 
> for the end-to-end encryption spec given the need to parse 
> CPIM formats (no existing libraries as far as I
> know) and support S/MIME (for which there are libraries, 
> although the use of S/MIME is not very "Jabberish").
> 
> Feel free to reply on or off list.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Peter
> 
> P.S. Yes, I owe the community an informational document that clearly
>      defines the differences between XMPP and Jabber for things like 
>      authentication and session initiation. I will write that document
>      by the middle of August.
> 
> --
> Peter Saint-Andre
> Jabber Software Foundation
> http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.php
> 
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