IBM

IBM S/MIME Introduction


[ Programming Guide Home | IBM S/MIME Home | Introduction | Packages ]

Introduction

The IBM S/MIME package provides the Java classes needed to encode and decode S/MIME messages. IBM S/MIME supports version 2 of the S/MIME specifications as described in RFC 2311, S/MIME Version 2 Message Specification. The IBM S/MIME package relies upon IBM PKCS.

The IBM S/MIME package is part of the IBM PKCS package since IBM S/MIME depends largely on the PKCS #7 and #10 specifications. The IBM PKCS pkcs7 package includes classes for the SignedData and EnvelopedData PKCS #7 types that are used in S/MIME. The IBM S/MIME package also uses the PKCS #10 CertificationRequest class. To send general purpose S/MIME messages, use the helper S/MIME classes in the com.ibm.security.smime package. This package provides a limited MIME parser.

The IBM S/MIME package requires IBM PKCS, Java 2, and a cryptographic provider to run. The IBM S/MIME package was tested with the IBM JCE provider.