RE: compression Transforms !?

The real answer is that you do not need to decompress resources.

Your resources are compressed, so sign the compressed files and validate the compressed files.  This is both far more efficient and presents NO security risk.  It is completely analogous to signing a PNG or JPEG rather than signing the uncompressed bit stream of the image that the PNG or JPEG represents.  Well, images may involve lossy compression, but this is orthogonal to the analogy because what is signed has a well-defined and stable tranformation into what is 'seen' or ultimately consumed by the application.

Other analogies would include signing XML markup rather than signing the machine code instructions for the processor that interprets the markup.

Best regards,
John Boyer, Ph.D.
Senior Product Architect and Research Scientist
PureEdge Solutions Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: jbekaert@lanl.gov [mailto:jbekaert@lanl.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 10:28 PM
To: w3c-ietf-xmldsig@w3.org
Subject: compression Transforms !?



hi all,

some questions regarding the use of compression Transforms in XML Sig
constructs:

* is there a _standardized_ Transform Algorithm that can be used to
compress/decompress a resource? I am dealing with a bunch of gzipped
resources for which a decompression (un-gzip) algorithm should be applied
prior to calculation of the digests.

* if no such Transform Algorithms exist, does anyone have experience in
using application-specific decompression (zip/gzip/...) transforms?

* also, is there a way to convey the mime type of the original
(uncompressed) resource inside the Transform XML construct?

many thanks
best regards
jeroen

--
Jeroen Bekaert

Digital Library Research and Prototyping team
Los Alamos National Laboratory
PO Box 1663, MS P362
Los Alamos, NM, 87545, USA
tel. +1 (505) 664 0580

Received on Thursday, 6 January 2005 21:15:15 UTC