Digesting headers

On Thu, 29 Feb 1996, Roy T. Fielding wrote:

> >    <header-digest> is a keyed digest over the entity headers (as defined by
> >    HTTP -- e.g., as of HTTP/1.1, Content-Type and other Content-* headers,
> >    Last-Modified, Expires, etc.) It is computed as
> 
> That won't work.  HTTP header fields of the same name can be appended
> together, and header fields of different names can be reordered, by
> any HTTP recipient without changing the semantics of the message.
> The only way to digest the header fields is to first encapsulate them
> using something like WRAPPED or MOSS.
> 
> 

Ok, digests of headers will have to wait for the WRAPPED method.

What about the date header being part of the data digested for the
message-digest.  Is it unsafe to assume that proxies will not mangle
the origin-server Date: header?


John Franks 	Dept of Math. Northwestern University
		john@math.nwu.edu

Received on Thursday, 29 February 1996 06:09:07 UTC