Gaspar Sinai wrote on 2002-02-15 04:44 UTC: > My point is: > having a reverse algorithm would solve a lot of problems: the > viewer of the text could actually run the reverse algorthm and > imagine the bitstream before signing it. They may argue that > the standard can not be changed.
I still think, there is a philosophical missunderstanding here about how digital signatures are to be interpreted in cases of legal dispute. What in most countries that have thought about the issue would count is what the human end user has seen on the display component of the device where the signature was generated. The actual bitstring signed is actually not as relevant here as you might believe. You do not need any reversibility, you just need a tightly standardized rendering process that produces the same readable text each time from the same bit string. That standardised rendering algorithm will be used as well in court to inspect the bitstring you have signed, not your hexdump editor or whatever alternative displaying process that you might come up with to provide a different text. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
