ietf-dkim
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[ietf-dkim] 1193 considered harmful

2006-03-21 09:48:35

I'm really astonished that an open item that had no list discussion that
I can find and that is backward incompatible with -allman-01 is being
"accepted". Why? Worse, is that there is absolutely no reason why we
need to break existing compatibility to achieve the goal of being able
to determine whether it's the header or body that's broken. Nor does it
appear that anybody's thought through which -- header or body --
actually more likely to break in transit.

I have for quite some time been placing a hash of the headers alone in
the DKIM signature in an unassigned tag (X= in this message) to help
me determine whether it's the headers or the body that broke on a failed
signature. It's cheap: I just call SHAx_Final when the headers are
hashed; it's unobtrusive: it doesn't require that we change our current
hashing mechanism; and it doesn't bring up any nettlesome issues with
l= which are tricky.

Given this, I consider the adoption to be seriously harmful to our
existing implementations, and counterproductive.

                Mike
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