Re: Meaning of document closure

Short version:

I think that the solution is now clear to the "signed in parts"problem,
that you must define (using xpath or sed or whatever) the way
a valid document is a function of the parts, and sign that document.

Long version:

I am worried that this "meaning of document closure" thread
is suggesting that signing parts should be construed as parts having meaning
in context.

Basically, logically, a document is a sentence in
a language, and we have applications which process documents
according to specs, and we say that documents have meaning.

Parts of documents do not have meaning per se.

It is not, of course, for the digital signature spec to say what the
semantics are
of a document -- that is the for the language.  It is for the digital
signature
to show how a document has been signed with a certain key.
It is for a trust system to determine the algorithm for defining what can be
inferred from
a document signed with a given key.

When we talk about signing parts of a document, then they only way
I can see of giving meaning to this is to say that we are signing a
some document which is not acutally given, but is formed by making
a particular transfortion on the document given.

One  can try to talk about the "semantics of a part of the document
in its context in the document" as much as one likes but one can only
define what it means by showing or defining that it is equivalent to some
other notional document.  John Boyer says, "An element's meaning can be
changed by tags and attributes of any element in its ancestor path. "
Well, you can change is by making any change anywhere along the lines of
"this overrides what I said in the paragraph above" -- depending of course
on the language you are writing in. But XML has no rules outlawing langauges
which allow that.  So you can't ask me to sign the odd-numbered second level
elements of a document. You can ask me to sign the document which would be
formed by stripping out all even-numbered second-level elements.

Life is then simplified.  A signature is over a document.
The document can be referred to, and/or enclosed, directly,
or specified as a manipulation function.  So long as both parties
know how to do it, any function can be used. This puts the
(xpath, say) function into a very similar position to the canonicalization
function.

We don't have (here) to discuss what modifications may or may not be made to
a document later.  A particular sentence has been signed. According to the
language,
one may be able to deduce other valid things and craete other believable
documents
by futher manipulations but this spec doesn't have to worry about that.

A signing user should of course be presented with the function being
signed rather than any original document.

I think this addresses for exaple the scenario Phill mentions in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-xml-plenary/1999Sep/0044.html

Tim BL

---------------------------

(By the way, I think of closure in the sense of the set of all objects
obtained by repeated application of an operation. I expected the term to
represent the repeated operation of finding all dependent references within
the document and signing them.  Dependent references meaning something which
affects the meaning and you won't already know and trust.

Received on Saturday, 18 September 1999 14:40:36 UTC