On 4/10/03 4:05 PM, "Brian Smith" <sbs(_at_)hush(_dot_)ai> wrote:
What's the reason for requiring that the first partial length be so long?
512 octets is considerably more than the headers, IV, etc of any data
packet would be.
It was to discourage its use for common things.
The partial length feature was created so you could use PGP as a streaming
protocol. Networks, tape backups, other things were all described to me as
hypothetical uses for them.
It's a cool thing, but you don't want to have to force everyone's decoder to
deal with the case were the first bytes of some packet are all delivered in
one-byte partials. So you want to have some minimum. You want it to be
longer than a block size of a cipher, and after that, it's all handwaving.
512 was picked because it's a reasonable size of buffer, even on a very
limited computer.
Jon