Subject: Re: LAST CALL:draft-ietf-pkix-time-stamp-05.txt

From: [email-masked] (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 10:57:54 (NZDT)

>This document is hereby issued for 14-day WG Last Call.  Please submit any
>comments to this list.

I have the usual ASN.1 style complaint, the whole thing contains large amounts
of unnecessary tagging which obscures the underlying data types (as well as 
making the encoding more complex than necessary).  For example in TimeStampReq:

TimeStampReq ::= SEQUENCE  {
     version                      Integer  { v1(1) },
     messageImprint               MessageImprint,
       --a hash algorithm OID and the hash value of the data to be
       --time stamped
     reqPolicy                [0] PolicyInformation      OPTIONAL,
     nonce                    [1] Integer                OPTIONAL,
     certReq                  [2] BOOLEAN           DEFAULT FALSE,
     extensions               [3] EXPLICIT Extensions    OPTIONAL
}

only the extensions actually need a tag, and that doesn't need to be explicit
(all the elements except the last are distinct, why are they given context-
specific tags?).  In addition the primitive types should really be 
capitalised, ie use INTEGER instead of Integer.  For the rest of the PDU's,
you can remove almost all the tags without causing any problems, which both
simplifies the encoding and makes the encoded data easier to work with (for
example you can actually see an INTEGER rather than just an opaque [0] blob).

Peter.

---

From: Magnus Nystrom <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 09:40:20 +0100 (W. Europe Standard Time)

I could not agree more. IMHO, these context tags adds confusion,
bits-on-the-wire, and makes type-checking harder. Please remove them.

-- Magnus

> example you can actually see an INTEGER rather than just an opaque [0] blob).

-- Magnus
Magnus Nystrom		Email: [email-masked]
RSA Laboratories