Transfer encoding indpendant signatures. Was (considered harmful.)

[Paul Elliott]

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> Your last two comments really illustrate the divison that we've previously
> seen on the pgp-mime list.  On the one side you have those who want to
> include the MIME headers in the digital signature, and on the other are those
> who want the signature to be over the data in it's "binary" (unencoded)
> form.  I _do_ see merit in the latter.  However, that was not the goal of
> my draft.  What I've been trying to get across is that my draft does not
> preclude you from writing your own draft on how to transmit detached
> signatures along with your message (perhaps something like
> multipart/pgp-signed).

OK, it's not PGP MIME's department. Still, I hope that someone will
develop a spec for doing the other, because as my examples show,
some users may need that ability. If specs & software for easy of
use with PGP & mail and widely available, it will tend to entrench
the use of PGP and encryption.


> 
> > Pressure will build for PGP MIME to support binary datapaths.
> 
> When this occurs, I will glady remove that restriction.

The problem is that the transision will occur gradually.
At what point do you tell one class of users that they
are out of luck, in order to better serve another kind of
user? Ten percent? Five percent? One percent? A tenth of a percent?
They will scream bloody murder.

What if you want to send signed mail to a mailing list that includes
users of both kinds of users. Your message will go to a
large number of people, so there is reason for efficiency. Do
you want to send two kinds of messages to users depending
on what kind of transfer they have available?

It is time to invent  transfer-encoding-independant signatures!

We are assuming that the user trusts the pgp-mime software
to specify what will be signed, so that my previous objection
to signing arbitary objects has been ruled out of order.

We want to invent a method of "signing" a complex mime object
that will detect any modification of the information the user is trying
to convey, but will allows us to change the transfer encoding
of a body part without invalidating the "signature".

What we need is a computable map M from the class of mime
objects to a class of "binary signature objects". (Which are basicly
streams of bytes which can be fed into PGP to generate or check a 
signature). ( Don't tell me there is this wierd machine that can not
represent a stream of bytes. PGP assumes that many of its files
are streams of bytes, so that such a machine can not run PGP
to generate or check a signatures and everything with respect
to signatures becomes mute.)


      CLASS OF
      MIME OBJECTS    ======= M ========> BINARY SIGNATURE
                                                    OBJECTS.

M should have the following properties:

 1) Any change in the "message" that the user wants to convey
       will change the object that it maps to under M.
 2) We can change the way a body part is transfer-encoded without
       changing the signature object it maps to under M.

Note: These binary signature objects are not going to be used to
transfer data. They are not going to be used to display information.
They are only going to be used to generate and check signatures.

Given such an M, is is possible to define a method of signing
a MIME object, that will detect any change to the "message",
but not invalidate the signature when changing how a body
part is transfer encoded.

To generate a signature, apply M and generate a PGP binary signature
on the result. To check a signature, apply M and PGP signature
check the result. It should work.

Is it possible to define such a map M? I think so, but I am not
100% certain on the details. Something approximately similar to
the following should work:

Go thru the object copying header lines as a stream of ascii bytes,
seperated UNIX style with linefeeds. Except, do not copy the transfer-encoding
lines or the delimiter fields. Or any other field that only serves to tell how
the object is transfer encoded. Convert the body parts themselves to
a stream of bytes as specified by the transfer-encoding field and
included in the outgoing stream. For text encoding, trailing white
space could be handled as per the draft. Other text canonicalization
as PGP does it. I believe that this method has the two properties 
mentioned above. Perhaps it needs to be somewhat modified.

I am sure that such a map M can be defined if smart people think about it.
- -- 
Paul Elliott                                  Telephone: 1-713-781-4543
Paul.Elliott at hrnowl.lonestar.org              Address:   3987 South Gessner #224
                                              Houston Texas 77063

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