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Re: [ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu: Re: SDSI syntax]

To: rivest@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Ron Rivest), spki@c2.org
Subject: Re: [ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu: Re: SDSI syntax]
From: hallam@w3.org
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 96 14:14:14 -0400
Cc: hallam@w3.org
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 30 Apr 96 09:28:07 EDT." <199604301328.AA04666@swan.lcs.mit.edu>
Sender: owner-spki@c2.org

Ron writes:

>SDSI allows one to express octet strings in several forms:
>      tokens:        abc
>      quoted-string: "abc"    
>      hexadecimal:   #616263  (starts with sharp sign)
>      base-64:       =YWRj    (starts with equals sign)
>      verbatim:      #03:abc  (that is, length:value)
>      decimal:       6382179
>
>These are all equivalent.  Parsing is trivial.

This raises a question, do we want to sign a cannonical form or not? S 
expressions should make conversion to a canonical form pretty cheap. Provided of 
course the canonical form isn't something derranged like DER which require 
multiple passes over the data.

If we can come up with a mechanism for converting to a canonical form in a 
linear manner (i.e. the transformation can be performed by and FSR) I think it 
would be a worthwhile thing to do. The finer points of Ron's syntax would then 
be conveniences and there would be less need to argue over them.

I would suggest for a canonical form removing all syntactically unnecessary 
whitespace and expressing all octet strings as tokens or in hexadecimal. (modulo 
some wording to clean this up).

	Phill

References:

[ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu: Re: SDSI syntax]

From: rivest@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Ron Rivest)

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