[messaging] alternative to OpenPGP?

[Peter Gutmann]

Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org> writes:

>Mansour Moufid <mansourmoufid at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Is there an alternative to the OpenPGP message format?
>
>Have you looked at JSON Web Encryption?
>
>https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7516

JWE is... well, it's an alternative in the same way that S/MIME is, but all
three formats do more or less the same thing, they just use different bit-
bagging techniques.  The main difference between the three is that PGP and
S/MIME use an efficient binary encoding while JWE uses a pretty inefficient
text encoding (when the RFC appeared my first reaction was "It's PEM
reinvented thirty years later").  So for:

>I cannot recall any technical advantage it has over OpenPGP though, so if
>OpenPGP is not sufficient for you, S/MIME likely aren't either.

you could say the same for JWE.

Peter.