ietf-mailsig
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: nowsp considered harmful

2005-07-20 08:45:52

 The first step of the manipulation was to make changes to the MIME
 structure that were canonicalized away by nowsp -- hence rendering
 parts of the signed message invisible without breaking the
 signature.

A premise to the wsp optimizations is that they do not affect the structure of 
the message.  So canonicalization of wsp is only for that has no structural 
impact.  For example, wsp at the beginning of a line in the rfc2822 header has 
very big structural impact because it means the line is a continuation of the 
previous line's header field.

In other words, the reference "line folding" for canonicalization is really a 
rule about structure-related processing, as distinct from "data-related" 
processing.

I think think means that the manipulation you cite with regards to MIME 
delimiters is to require canonicalization to be aware of MIME structure 
constructs and to make sure that they are preserved?


  d/
  ---
  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  +1.408.246.8253
  dcrocker  a t ...
  WE'VE MOVED to:  www.bbiw.net




<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>