ietf-openpgp
[Top] [All Lists]

MUST accept 32 bit lols everywhere?

1997-11-24 17:14:45

Will Price <wprice(_at_)pgp(_dot_)com>
All this bit twiddling and little hacks to scrimp on an extra bit here
and there is dangerous!  Which hacker is it at PGP Inc that thrives on
these bit twiddling hacks?  Come one 'fess up!

I couldn't agree more with you on this one issue.  I've been saying this
for years.  Unfortunately, I think the point is really moot.  These are
format issues.  The format is already there and you can't really change it
fundamentally without violating the WG charter.

I think Peter Gutmann's suggestion shows how the move to 32 bit could
be made without any major changes.

So pgp2.x has lol field values 0, 1, 2 to mean 1 byte, 2 bytes and 4
bytes.  All that needs to be done is to depracate lol field values 0
and 1.  Ian Grigg said he tried this with his systemics pgp2.x
implementation cryptix2.x but found cases where the pgp2.x code base
could not handle 4 byte lengths!

A good start in depracating 1 and 2 byte length fields would be to 
firstly define that everywhere in OpenPGP1.0 that the implementation
MUST be able to accept a 32 bit int.

Adam