At 19:02 +1000 2006/09/14, James A. Donald wrote:
Suppose the padding was simply
010101010101010 ... 10101010101010000 hash
with all leading zeros in the hash omitted, and four
zero bits showing where the actual hash begins.
Then the error would never have been possible.
I beg to differ. A programmer who didn't understand the significance
of crypto primitives would (as many did) just search for the end of
the padding to locate the beginning of the hash, and check that the
next set of bytes were identical to the hash, then return "true". So
01010101 ... 10101010101010000 hash crappetycrap
would still be considered valid. There's a lot of code out there that
ignored the fact that after the FFs was specific ASN.1 stuff, and
just treated it as a defined part of the padding.
Greg.
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