Action 05-10-03-06 canonicalization issues for onward transmissionto WSS

[Konrad Lanz <Konrad.Lanz@labs.cio.gv.at>]

Dear all,

Re: Action 05-10-03-06 on chairs (NP and JC) and Konrad to draft an 
email regarding the canonicalization issues for onward transmission to WSS.

The problem described in brief is:

If expressions (XPath-Expressions) inside XPath-Filters (or 
XPath-Filters 2.0), XSLT etc.. used in the chain of transforms (i.e. 
<ds:Reference>/<ds:Transforms>/<ds:Transform>) are used in a way so that 
they may also refer to parts of the transport protocol will behave 
differently depending on whether the document is inside it's transport 
protocol or not. Behavior can then also change depending on SOAP 
normalizations which is used in WSS.

Countermeasures taken in DSS are to either treat the document opaquely 
(<Base64XML>, <EscapedXML>) not being able to inherit information from 
the transport protocol or to use a well defined extraction (here: 
exclusive Canonicalization for <InlineXML>) that strips off potential 
for outer interference. (Btw. Optimizations will be able achieve the 
effect of exclusive Canonicalization in Memory).

Not doing this would enable the creation of signatures being valid in 
the context of one system, but not valid in the context of another.

Please also check issues surrounding other heritable context and 
attributes in  http://www.w3.org/XML/Core/ and follow the current 
discussions on http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-core-wg/.

best regards
Konrad