On Sun, Dec 21, 2003, Lev Walkin wrote: > Dr. Stephen Henson wrote: > >On Sat, Dec 20, 2003, Lev Walkin wrote: > > > > > >>Dr. Stephen Henson wrote: > >> > >>> > >>>Most applications wouldn't need to do that and it would be creating > >>>something > >>>non standard in any case. > >> > >>Indeed. Hovewer, "everything standard" is already created, so why bother > >>programming at all? ;) > >> > > > > > >That's something which I ask myself a lot... > > > >What can happen in the non standard cases is that if applications generate > >a > >file with -----BEGIN SOME PROPRIETARY STRING----- someone will want to > >interop > >with it and generally posts the question here or more likely dumps the > >thing > >on me... > > How many times did it happen already?.. >
It hasn't with PEMs yet (I suspect that one is being sent even as I write this) but I've been here long enough to know how these things happen. For example I get sent lots of private keys, some which can be handled already by OpenSSL and some in proprietary formats. This varies from test keys to horribly important production keys for webservers private email certificates and the odd level 3 software publishing certificate. No root CAs yet though... One particular format is generated and used by a certain piece of software from a large multinational company (who shall remain nameless). I've received lots of those, the format is easy to reconize it just looks like unstructured random data. I've even been sent a query about how to read that from one different department of the company that writes the product that generates the things. Steve. -- Dr Stephen N. Henson. Email, S/MIME and PGP keys: see homepage OpenSSL project core developer and freelance consultant. Funding needed! Details on homepage. Homepage: http://www.drh-consultancy.demon.co.uk ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org Development Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
