Looking at the Radix-64 section, I noticed the phrase
The checksum with its leading equal sign MAY appear on the first line
after the base64 encoded data.
I understand it is that way to convey that the checksum may not appear
at all, but it would be better to explicitly say so.
diff --git a/crypto-refresh.md b/crypto-refresh.md
index 9fbb6eb..bb9635b 100644
--- a/crypto-refresh.md
+++ b/crypto-refresh.md
@@ -2100,7 +2100,7 @@ As stated in the introduction, OpenPGP's underlying
native representation for ob
In principle, any printable encoding scheme that met the requirements of the
unsafe channel would suffice, since it would
not change the underlying binary bit streams of the native OpenPGP data
structures.
The OpenPGP standard specifies one such printable encoding scheme to ensure
interoperability.
-OpenPGP's Radix-64 encoding is composed of two parts: a base64 encoding of the
binary data and a checksum.
+OpenPGP's Radix-64 encoding is composed of two parts: a base64 encoding of the
binary data and an optional checksum.
The base64 encoding is identical to the MIME base64 content-transfer-encoding
{{RFC2045}}.
The checksum is a 24-bit Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) converted to four
characters of radix-64 encoding by the same MIME
base64 transformation, preceded by an equal sign (=).
@@ -2108,7 +2108,7 @@ The CRC is computed by using the generator 0x864CFB and
an initialization of 0xB
The accumulation is done on the data before it is converted to radix-64,
rather than on the converted data.
A sample implementation of this algorithm is in the next section.
-The checksum with its leading equal sign MAY appear on the first line after
the base64 encoded data.
+If present, the checksum with its leading equal sign SHALL appear on the next
line after the base64 encoded data.
Rationale for CRC-24: The size of 24 bits fits evenly into printable base64.
The nonzero initialization can detect more errors than a zero initialization.
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