Re: public key (was Re: consensus probe.)

["Andersson, Mats" <mats.andersson%appgate.com@localhost>]

On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Joseph Galbraith wrote:
> For example, we could specify (unambiguously) that x509v3-sign-rsa
> keys would use ssh-rsa signatures.  There is no ambiguity here, hence

Why would we want to do this (though these two signatures happens to be of
the same format as defined in PKCS1), what is the flexibility to be able
to use keys of a certain format for generating (potentially) differently
formatted signatures? If it is not usable for something extraordinary why
include it, it might just confuse some implementation that it sends a key
of format X and receives a signature of format Y (I'm tired so there might
be uses for this but I can't find one except for "lazy" code-reuse :-).

>    Signatures are encoded as follows:
>      string   signature format identifier (as specified by the public
> key/cert format)
>      byte[n]  signature blob in format specific encoding
> 
>   Public key / certificate formats that do not
>   explicitly specify a signature format identifier
>   MUST be considered to use the public key / certificate
>   format identifier as the signature identifier.

However, doesn't this sound like it can be interpreted as if the signature
format identifier might be ommited alltogether?! (or is it just me beeing
dizzy here?).

Cheers,

/Mats