On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Phil Griffin wrote:
>
>
> Bancroft Scott wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Phil Griffin wrote:
> >
> > > As I stated in this thread, if the receiver preserves the
> > > encoding used in the signature process as sent, it does
> > > not even matter if the encoding is not canonical or that
> > > it is encoded correctly.
> > >
> > > But an LDAP thread recently reveals that the receiver often
> > > does not preserve the original encoding of DER objects, which
> > > can mask encoding errors that become apparent only when
> > > the receiver tries to encode again and the signature
> > > check fails.
> >
> > I think that this is a bit different, Phil. Given that RELAIVE-OID
> > is in use, any change to it between decoding and re-encoding would
> > be fundamental. It would be exactly as if we had the likes of
> > "name UTF8String,". Although "Bancroft Scott" and "Bancroft Scott "
> > are the same abstract values in a sense, we don't make rules for
> > applications to follow about what to do about trailing blanks. Along
>
> Actually Bancroft, you're totally wrong here. You're
> thinking only about the sorts of rules you commonly
> make in the ASN.1 standards. This is an application
> standard, and it would be perfectly within scope to
> assert that trailing blanks should not be used by a
> message sender. The two strings you provide in fact
> would fail an exact match test, yet they would appear
> when displayed to a human user exactly the same.
I *think* I follow what you are saying - what we are specifying here is at
the application level, so it is appropriate to impose such rules. No
argument.
So, do you wish to forbid trailing 0's in RELATIVE-OID's when they are
used for date-time? What about UTF8String values in particular uses,
do we restrict trailing blanks? Anything else that we should be
considering?
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