At 10:45 PM 7/8/98 +0100, Adam Back wrote:
It seems to me that allocating #7 for this or that which is not
implemented yet is a good enough idea, BUT that we need someone who
offers to act as a central clearling house to avoid collisions in IDs
for IDs allocated between now and when work on OpenPGP 2.0 starts.
This is necessary because for new algorithms, or new features etc.,
there may well be multiple proposals for the same algorithm. So
allocating #12 to the succesful AES candidate is in itself useless,
because there may be 2 or 3 incompatible implementations.
There's something odd about that.
If there is one AES but 2 incompatible implementations, then either
the standard is broken, or (at least) one implementation is. If the
standard is correctly specified, then implementations will be
compatible.
So it seems to me reasonable to assign a number to "AES" on the
assumption that the definers of AES will do their job properly.
paul