Re: [ubl-ndrsc] Digital Signatures

[Paul Thorpe <thorpe@oss.com>]

On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Eduardo Gutentag wrote:

> Paul,
> 
> I believe the industry standard for XML documents is XML Signature.

Please look at the XML Signature standard, and you will notice that it
uses X.509v3.  I am just pointing out that you can avoid the added
overhead of XML Signitures by using X.509 directly.n

Paul

> 
> 
> 
> 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.
> > 
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Paul E. Thorpe                                 Toll Free    : 1-888-OSS-ASN1
> > OSS Nokalva                                    International: 1-732-302-0750
> > Email: thorpe@oss.com                          Tech Support : 1-732-302-9669
> > http://www.oss.com                             Fax          : 1-732-302-0023
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > You may leave a Technical Committee at any time by visiting http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/ubl-ndrsc/members/leave_workgroup.php
> > 
> 
> -- 
> 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
> 
> 
> You may leave a Technical Committee at any time by visiting http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/ubl-ndrsc/members/leave_workgroup.php
> 
>