Re: SSH_MSG_KEXGSS_HOSTKEY (was: Re: I-D ACTION:draft-weber-secsh-pkalg-none-00.txt)

[Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz%cmu.edu@localhost>]

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Joel N. Weber II wrote:

> Looking at the January 2002 mailing list archive, it becomes clear
> that while the public key types defined in the transport draft have
> this encoding:
>
>      string   certificate or public key format identifier
>      byte[n]  key/certificate data
>
> there is no requirement that public key types defined elsewhere will
> have that encoding.  Perhaps the gsskeyex draft should explicitly say
> that SSH_MSG_KEXGSS_HOSTKEY only works with ssh-dss and ssh-rsa keys,
> or that it only works with types that start out with the type
> identifier as a string.

Hm..
My interpretation of the description of public key algorithms in section
4.6 of the transport draft is that the encoding described above applies to
_all_ public key types, not just the ones defined in that document.  In
particular, the section you quoted contains general information describing
the nature of public key algorithms and key and certificate formats.  The
descriptions of specific algorithms defined in that document occur further
down, and while they do describe key formats including the specific value
of the format identifier to be used, this duplication is consistent with
usage in these documents.

-- Jeff