I think, PGP/MIME is the way to go. It has a well-defined and quite interoperable way of signing metadata together with the document and OpenPGP trumps everything else in terms of flexibility when it comes to keys making assertions about other keys. Yes, it's a heavy standard, but partial implementations work quite well. My suggestion would be to adopt OpenPGP for signatures and design something simpler for transport-level crypto. You are free to leave the Web of Trust out, too.
That's what I'd do, anyway.
P.S.: There are usable OpenPGP libraries around, but neither is good for all purposes. If you tell me more, I can give you recommendations what libraries to use. But even coding up OpenPGP from scratch (referring to RFC2440bis) is not that terribly difficult, if you leave out the functionality that you don't need.
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timeasmymeasure
Go for PGP/MIME!
Date: 2007-02-28 01:39 pm (UTC)Yes, it's a heavy standard, but partial implementations work quite well. My suggestion would be to adopt OpenPGP for signatures and design something simpler for transport-level crypto. You are free to leave the Web of Trust out, too.
That's what I'd do, anyway.
P.S.: There are usable OpenPGP libraries around, but neither is good for all purposes. If you tell me more, I can give you recommendations what libraries to use. But even coding up OpenPGP from scratch (referring to RFC2440bis) is not that terribly difficult, if you leave out the functionality that you don't need.