ietf-openpgp
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Curiosity: use of deviant old-style headers in hash material

2003-03-21 09:53:42

David's requests for clarifications leads me to ask a historical
question... why were the constants in the hash material chosen to be
the old-style packet headers with length-of-length set inconsistently
with their use here?  In the following excerpt, the natural
length-of-length would be 2 (4-byte length to follow) rather than 0
(1-byte length to follow).  Was this a mistake, an intentional
deviation to prevent some perceived attack, a strange artifact of the
PGP5 implementation, or something else?  (This is just a curiosity,
not a request that it be documented.)

   without any header. A V4 certification hashes the constant 0xb4 for
   user ID certifications or the constant 0xd1 for User Attribute
   certifications (which are old-style packet headers with the
   length-of-length set to zero), followed by a four-octet number



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