A new round of the LDAPv3 RFCs have been published by the IETF.

• LDAP: Technical Specification Road Map [RFC450]
• LDAP: The Protocol [RFC4511]
• LDAP: Directory Information Models [RFC4512]
• LDAP: Authentication Methods and Security Mechanisms [RFC4513]
• LDAP: String Representation of Distinguished Names [RFC4514]

Boldon James, in collaboration with ISODE, have announced a Exchange-based STANAG 4406 Annex E solution for low bandwith environments. They join Nexor, with their Nexor Vanguard product, and Thales in offering a tactical X.400 messaging solution.
Thales and Nexor performed the first STANAG 4406 Annex E interoperability at last year's CWID 05 and ironed out a number of issues. The products were not considered mature at that time and it was recommended that further trials would be useful at CWID 06.

Ethereal 0.10.14 was released between Christmas and New Year and now includes support for all the X.500 protocols: DAP, DSP, DISP and DOP. It has already be used to successfully verify and correct some DOP implementations. Hopefully it will be an equally useful tool for DISP interoperability.

Also included in 0.10.14 was X.400 support for all the extended bodyparts including FTBP, General Text and forwarded content. Security label dissection was also enhanced to support some widely used security category types to support restrictive, informative and permissive categories.

Further details can be found in the latest Ethereal Release Notes.

Further enhancements are still be incorporated including the ACP133 EdB attributes and hopefully a generic way for Ethereal to dissect custom schemas.

A recent article in Signal, the AFCEA publication, about the German NuKomBw system makes some incorrect claims about ACP145.

It claims that ACP145 was defined by NATO, where in fact it is defined by the CCEB. The CCEB define ACPs whereas NATO define STANAGs.

It also claims that only the U.S. have a partner ACP145 gateway. However many nations have been demonstrating ACP145 interoperability at JWIDO4 and CWID05. In fact all of the CCEB Nations who actually defined ACP145.

Some people may say you are asking for trouble if you call your email system "X.500".

The students at the University of Minneapolis seem to
think so.

No wonder they can't find the "sent items" folder!

X.500 support has been incorporated into Ethereal. Initially this includes the Directory Access Protocol (DAP), the OSI equivalent of LDAP, and the Directory Information Shadowing Protocol (DISP) - for replicating information between DSAs.

In addition, File Transfer Body Part support has been included for X.400 messages.

This support has not yet been accepted into the Ethereal development tree, but if you would like to test an Ethereal build with DISP support, please contact ethereal@smhs.co.uk.

The lastest version of Ethereal was released on Wednesday 19th October 2005.
This includes support for X.411 (P1), X.420(P22) and STANAG 4406(P772) protocols - as well as incorporating the existing CMS dissector to support secure P772 messages.

For further details see the release notes.

The next version (0.10.13) of the open-source protocol analyzer Ethereal will include support for X.400 messaging, including both P772 and PCT content types from STANAG 4406.
Ethereal allows the message traffic to be captured from the network and then displayed in a structured form.

At CWID this year, the first interoperability trials where held for the tactical messaging profile of STANAG 4406. The Nexor Vanguard gateway, used by both the United Kingdom and France, successfully interoperated with the Thales gateway used by Norway.
A brief overview of the architecture is available in this Norwegian presentation.
The trials successfully demonstrated the exchange of formal messages in low-bandwidth environments in both uni-cast and mul

From the middle of May 2005, the MMHS WG5 Archive has been closed to public access. A username/password is now required to log on to the archive.

The archive contains NATO Unclassified documents discussed by the working group as well as STANAG 4406 related items. It is not clear why access to the whole archive has been restricted.

As the main site has been unavailable, it is not possible to determine what documents have been left publicly available.

The document index and meeting index (up until May 2005) will be maintained on this site though a username/password will be required to follow the links.