NODE a387c194Re: Signing ascii text
wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (Bill Stewart +1-908-949-0705 wcs@anchor.ho.att.com)Wed, 23 Dec 92 15:31:40 PST
The problem with signing whitespace-compressed canonicalized text isn't the
loss of readability, since you can send the non-canonicalized version for humans.
The problem is that sometimes the white space IS significant
Project-Schedule 1992 1993 1994
Phase 1 X
Phase 2 X
Phase 3 X
would acquire the same signature if you moved the Xs to different columns.
If we're going to treat white space in text as significant, we made need
to adopt a scheme such as MIME's =xx content-transfer-ncodings;
Otherwise we need to declare by fiat that white space is not significant
unless protected by an encoding.
Bill Stewart