On Friday 08 March 2002 12:05, Jake wrote:
> I understand the behavior and I am wondering about its implications, e.g.
> someone stores their encryption key that started with "0x00" to disk in
> hex, and future key loading would shift all the bytes of the key
> forward.... you get the picture. Jake

If they're storing numbers then this isn't a problem (eg. RSA components). 
0x00abcdef is the same as 0xabcdef so representation with or without a 
leading zero is irrelevant. If you're talking about other key data that is 
abstract binary data, then you wouldn't be using BN_*** operations to 
handle (de)serialisation that would you?

Or to put it another way, a number (specifically BIGNUM integer) is unique 
unto itself even if its possible representations aren't. What situation are 
you thinking of where the exact representation of a BIGNUM would need to be 
invariant, especially where the source of that representation was not 
originally from BN_bn2bin() anyway?

Cheers,
Geoff

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