IETF RFC 3274 PDF

This document defines a format for using compressed data as a Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS) content type. Compressing data before transmission provides a number of advantages, including the elimination of data redundancy which could help an attacker, speeding up processing by reducing the amount of data to be processed by later steps (such as signing or encryption), and reducing overall message size. Although there have been proposals for adding compression at other levels (for example at the MIME or SSL level), these don't address the problem of compression of CMS content unless the compression is supplied by an external means (for example by intermixing MIME and CMS).