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Subject: RE: [security-services] the Time Issue


I fail to see the problem.

I don't believe that there is a requirement to support round tripping which
is robust enough to preserve a digital signature. And if there was I
certainly don't think that it is likely to be meetable in practice. I am not
aware that the feature has been used to any advantage in X.509. The DER
encoding that it required was probbaly the single biggest impediment to
getting interoperability and deployment of X.509.

If you want to regenerate the original document or node then store that
instead of the signature. Disks are cheap, even RAM is cheap. 

I would much rather we look into mechanisms to deliberately sabotage
round-tripping than cripple the spec to meet an imagined requirement.

		Phill


Phillip Hallam-Baker FBCS C.Eng.
Principal Scientist
VeriSign Inc.
pbaker@verisign.com
781 245 6996 x227


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rich Salz [mailto:rsalz@zolera.com]
> Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 10:00 AM
> To: Hal Lockhart
> Cc: Hallam-Baker, Phillip; Security-Services (E-mail);
> stephen.farrell@baltimore.ie
> Subject: Re: [security-services] the Time Issue
> 
> 
> I'm sorry, you're right, I wasn't clear enough.  I meant that 
> the issue 
> has been discussed in XML Schema mailing lists and the soapbuilders 
> mailing list.
> 
> The issue is, basically, this.  XML is a "printed" 
> representation, so if 
> you send schema-typed data, you have all the standard round-off and 
> truncation kinds of issues for floating-point numbers.  For example, 
> what happens when your SOAP layer converts the XML text node 
> "2.99999999999999999" into a local floating-point number?  The XML 
> Schema spec makes no requirements.  And the problem is 
> compounded when 
> you convert the local floating-point number back out to an 
> XML text node 
> for output.
> 
> That concept, XML->native->XML, also known as the conversion 
> from Schema 
> lexical space to value space and back, is known as 
> round-tripping.  And 
> if you search the archives (e.g., [1]), you'll see it's an issue.
> 
> I strongly suggest that SAML avoid arbitrary precision issues and 
> mandate millisec or microsec granularity, only.
> 
> > I can see no scenario in SAML where this is required or 
> even desirable. 
> > I suggest we adopt as an explicit non-goal the ability to 
> convert the 
> > contents of an assertion to a local format and back. If you 
> need the 
> > orginal for some purpose such as audit, just keep a copy. 
> Does the time 
> > precision issue still exist if this non-goal is accepted?
> 
> 
> Yes, see above.
> 
> 	/r$
> 
> 
> [1] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/soapbuilders/message/1793
> 
> -- 
> Zolera Systems, http://www.zolera.com
> Information Integrity, XML Security
> 

Phillip Hallam-Baker (E-mail).vcf



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