ietf-openpgp
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Notation subpacket lengths, other things

1998-05-29 16:52:03
At 02:13 PM 5/29/98 +0200, Christoph Moser wrote:

   I can't see a subpacket type that could use a 5 octet length.
   
As Tom Zerucha pointed out, the 2-byte length is actually only ~8K. That's
enough for a short letter home, but there are conceivable reasons you'd
want more. In particular, the notation subpacket, which is really a
general-purpose extension subpacket could get to 8K.

I think Hal's point that we *really* need a V5 signature to solve this is
valid, and discussion-stopper to me. It's for OpenPGP V1.1. We'll pick this
up again.

However, I'd like to point out that the there is a need for arbitrarily
long signatures, and thus V5 sigs. The Standalone Signature is designed to
be used for things that are like SPKI or X.509 or PGPticket, which Vinnie
has been designing. It's conceivable that there's a use for a ticket that's
greater than 64K. In any event, I believe it would be a grave error to
*exclude* such a thing from being built solely because of not wanting the
option of a long length field.

In any event, a new signature version is a post-V1 issue.

        Jon



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Jon Callas                                  jon(_at_)pgp(_dot_)com
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