Re: non-standard ProxyAuth extension?

The inferences that can be drawn from my comment may be the closest to an
answer that there is.  ProxyAuth was suggested by Netscape 5 years ago.  It
was soundly denounced at the time as a flawed (security issues, filesystem
dependencies) and unnecessary (SASL provides a superior mechanism that is
multiprotocol as well) idea.  As far as I can tell, the document never went
beyond draft 00.

It can be inferred that only Netscape ever implemented it (assuming that they
did, and that it is still in the Netscape server).  Since there is no reason
to implement it, it can be inferred that there will be no new implementations.

That, in turn, leads to the inference that it is not "common"; or at least no
more "common" than the Netscape server.

I've been contacted by VPIM folks from time to time about deploying my server
with VPIM clients.  Given that the UW server does not implement ProxyAuth, I
infer that the VPIM community does not depend upon it.  This inference is
strengthed by the fact that ProxyAuth is *not* one of the things which the
VPIM community has asked the IMAP community to work on.

Given the architectural flaws (including security design flaws) in ProxyAuth,
this all should be quite enough to declare ProxyAuth to be dead, and not to be
used or implemented.

On Wed, 04 Sep 2002 13:27:03 -0400, Tony Hansen wrote:
> Mark, I don't disagree. However, I still need my questions answered.
> Mark Crispin wrote:
> > I don't see any reason to implement ProxyAuth now that we have a superior
> > mechanism in SASL.