Re: Last call comments on XML Encryption specs

Joseph Reagle wrote:


> I'm not quite sure I undersatnd this. A partially encrypted XML document is 
> XML. It's XML that has a few xenc:EncryptedData elements. Those elements 
> include characters in CipherValue that represent octets (which are the 
> encrypted form of something else which I will return too) as encoded by 
> base64Binary.


Okay, I grasp that.  The transcoder can be a general XML transcoder,
then; it does not need to treat EncryptedData elements specially,
only the XML declaration.


> Now, what is the nature of this data that has been encrypted: the 
> plaintext? It is an octect sequence that represents in UTF-8 the characters 
> resulting from serializing some part of an XML document. This XML fragment 
> (the part of the original source XML that is to be encrypted) might not be 
> well-formed in a few instances.


So I was right in saying that, in the general case, the decrypter must
be able to transcode from UTF-8 to the entity encoding, and a fortiori
the encrypter must be able to transcode from the entity encoding
to UTF-8 (unless that has already been done by the XML parser).

-- 
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Received on Wednesday, 9 January 2002 17:03:37 UTC