RE: [office] What to do about encryption?

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

The intriguing use of an outer archive is that it can be used to contain any
kind of inner archive, so it is a valuable provision in general packaging.  

It also occurred to me that this could be used to encrypt standalone XML
documents, including the single-XML-file OpenDocument format.  It is
relatively easy to sign that document using XML Dsig already, although we
don't address that prospect in the ODF specification.

Just thinking out loud.


  - Dennis
  - - - - - - - - - - - - -
   Standards are arbitrary solutions to recurring problems (R. W. Bemer)
   Although not by becoming the recurring problem (orcmid).
  When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

-----Original Message-----
From: David LeBlanc [mailto:dleblanc@exchange.microsoft.com] 
Sent: Monday, May 10, 2010 14:46
To: ODF TC List (office@lists.oasis-open.org)
Subject: [office] What to do about encryption?

We also need to do something with encryption, as well - the existing
approach has a number of problems.

[ ... ]

How to fix it:

Use an outer archive to contain the inner archive. The outer archive is
itself a valid ODF file, and contains:

1) Encryption information (you could put this in the metadata as you do now,
or could make a separate file)
2) Benign metadata (optional)
3) Dummy files (optional)

[ ... ]