On Tue, 25 Nov 1997, Anonymous wrote:
A crude approach would be to sign every paragraph or line separately, but that's obviously inelegant.
Or use a MIME attachment to store secure hashes (heck, these could even be CRC32's if you're not too paranoid which you could pack into 5 bytes of ascii or something) of each of the lines in the body, then a valid signature of all the hashes at the end. When you reply to such a message, you'll need to reattach the hash attachment to the reply along with some sort of translation table that says line 20 in this message is quoted from line 502 in the original. You'll also need some way to do quotes that won't interfere with the hash testing... maybe using block quotes such as :Begin_Quote text :End_Quote or delete the ">" chars. But you'll get in trouble with auto text justifications... i.e. reply signature mime attachment: *Quoted Lines used: 15=234, 16=235, 17=236, etc... *From Original Mime attachment: *Begin body hashes line1hash line2hash line3hash line4hash line5hash.... lineNhash *Begin body hash signature slkdjflskdjfjsdlfjsdlf *End signature Or when you quote the message, you could have the begin_quote blocks have the line translation in them. If you don't mind shoving HTML in the text, the begin quote blocks in the body of the reply could include the line number. i.e. (using square brackets so those using HTML readers will see this.) [Strong][QuoteLine55-69] text_of_lines55-69_from_original_message_here. [/QUOTE][/Strong] Problem with this scheme: But, then what do we do about quoted quotes from the reply of the reply???? We could recurse the stuff through, but then deep replies will have a large number of attachments if we chose to retain them... Possible solution, don't keep quoted quote signatures, or just keep the message id's of them so they can be verified from an archive server or something... While you will need special mailer clients to decode the attachments and verify the quotes, you still want some compatibility with regular mail clients... =====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos============== .+.^.+.| Ray Arachelian |Prying open my 3rd eye. So good to see |./|\. ..\|/..|sunder@sundernet.com|you once again. I thought you were |/\|/\ <--*-->| ------------------ |hiding, and you thought that I had run |\/|\/ ../|\..| "A toast to Odin, |away chasing the tail of dogma. I opened|.\|/. .+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"|my eye and there we were.... |..... ======================= http://www.sundernet.com ==========================