Re: [ubl-ndrsc] Digital Signatures

[Eduardo Gutentag <eduardo.gutentag@sun.com>]

Paul,

I believe the industry standard for XML documents is XML Signature.



Paul Thorpe wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In the last UBL NDRSC phone call I promised to send more information about
> the use of digital signatures in all UBL documents.  I agree with David
> Burdett that an optional field should be added to all UBL documents, but
> believe the industry standard X.509 based signatures should be used.  The
> reason I suggest this is that this does not require you to preserve binary
> content of what was signed.  Anyone who wishes to authenticate the
> signature can recreate that binary content when they need to do the
> authentication since DER (Distinguished Encoding Rules) is truely
> canonical (has exactly one way of encoding any given message).
> 
> Note that even Canonical-XML requires you to preserve the namespace
> prefixes that were in the XML tags, so you would really need to preserve
> the complete XML document (tags with prefixes and all) along with the
> signature in order to authenticate it if you directly sign the XML
> document.
> 
> By making the field optional, no one is required to use the digital
> signatures, but can if they wish to.
> 
> This optional signature field should placed in the schema immediately
> before or after the global element whose contents need authentication.
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> 
> 
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-- 
Eduardo Gutentag               |         e-mail: eduardo.gutentag@Sun.COM
Web Technologies and Standards |         Phone:  +1 510 550 4616 x31442
Sun Microsystems Inc.          |         1800 Harrison St. Oakland, CA 94612
W3C AC Rep / OASIS TAB Chair