On Sun, Mar 14, 2004 at 10:30:58PM +1300, Peter Gutmann wrote:
I would like to see the RFC strongly discourage arbitrary jumbling
and nesting of assorted packet types in favour of a single, clean
canonical encoding. So instead of:
ENCRYPTED( COMPRESS, COMPRESSED, COMPRESSED )
or somesuch there should just be a straightforward:
ENCRYPTED( COMPRESS )
Explicitly allowing complex jumbles of packets seems to be just
asking for trouble/interop problems, particularly when there hasn't
been any strong need for them in the first 10 years or so of PGP's
existence.
I think this is a good idea. I'm actually quite happy with the
grammar given in bis-09. It's the same as the 2440 grammar with the
single change that you can have a run of literal packets.
Any implementation is of course free to be more liberal in what it
accepts, but I also see no need to explicitly allow arbitrary jumbling
and nesting especially since nobody has posted a reason why such
constructions are useful.
David