Hi,
regarding to chapter 3.4 of the rfc2440bis-10 "the character set for
text is the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode".
Does this mean I have to convert e.g. the text body (text/plain) of a
mail to UTF-8 before encryption? Until today I thought this concerns
only user ids, URIs, notations etc and data to be encrypted is handled
as a binary stream.
This question sounds silly but I have some problems to handle the
decrypted data of "OpenPGP compliant" programs sent by famous mail
clients...
One mail client plugin does convert every mail to UTF-8 (e.g. german
"umlauts" or the euro currency symbol) before encryption. There is no
special "charset" line in the ASCII armored body because UTF-8 is the
default. You can configure the mail client to use "iso-8859-1",
"iso-8859-15", "utf-8" or whatever. Nothing changes. The encrypted data
is still UTF-8.
What should another client do on decryption? Convert back from UTF-8?
Handle the byte stream as is?
Here some examples:
CryptoEx does convert on encryption not on clear signing
PGP does not convert at all
GnuPG does not convert at all
I am a little bit confused.
--
Best Regards,
Holger Sesterhenn