RE: [dss] Observations on TST

[Trevor Perrin <trevp@trevp.net>]

At 09:32 AM 8/15/2003 +0100, Nick Pope wrote:
> > Trevor wrote:
> > One thing that worries me about the Accuracy field, as in RFC
> > 3161 and the
> > Entrust proposal, is that the client has to add and subtract the Accuracy
> > field with the timestamp time to determine the upper and lower bounds.
> >
> > Isn't this non-trivial?  The client might have to know how many
> > days are in
> > each month, leap-years, leap-seconds, that sort of thing.
> >
> > Would it be easier for the server to explicitly return an upper and lower
> > bound, instead of an Accuracy?
> >
>
>I am not expecting that the upper and lower bounds is the main interest.  I
>see accuracy as a quality indicator.  Changing to upper and lower bounds
>make it much more difficult to decide whether the time-stamp is accurate
>enough for my purposes.

That's true.  I wonder if there's anyone with experience using RFC 3161 who 
can tell us how useful Accuracy is, and what it's most commonly used for.

Trevor