ietf-openpgp
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Re: Armour

1997-11-26 12:11:53
At 10:28 AM 11/26/97 -0800, Hal Finney wrote:
separation does not exist.  I used the example of disk files.  Now, some
people have said that this should not count, either because people don't
exchange disk files, or they don't need disk files to be ascii armored.

No, the major reason for dismissing it is that it is outside the scope of
this effort, since this is a standards effort for the Internet, which means
it is for transport across data networks, not storage on files.

Actually, people do exchange disk files all the time, either as email
attachments, or by FTP, or by sharing them in other ways.  And there

In which case they are disk files and, again, are outside of the scope of
this effort.

This is effort is about adding security to Internet objects.

The only way that I can see to support this with PGP/MIME is to make
the file consist of the MIME headers, then a blank line, then the MIME
body parts.  In effect we adopt a convention that files do have two parts,
control information and data, and that they are separated by a blank line.

The idea that armour does not impose its own encoding conventions is really
rather strange.  The fact that you seem to think it does not probably
reflects a comfort with one approach and discomfort with another.  This is
not a technical issue, it is psychological.

In addition, I mentioned that PGP/MIME does not provide methods to
encapsulate some legal PGP packet structures which were expected not to
be used for email.


Details?

d/
--------------------
Dave Crocker                                          
dcrocker(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
Internet Mail Consortium                               +1 408 246 8253
675 Spruce Dr.                                    fax: +1 408 249 6205
Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA              info(_at_)imc(_dot_)org , 
http://www.imc.org

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