Re: applying AES-GCM to secure shell: proposed "tweak"

[Peter Gutmann <pgut001%cs.auckland.ac.nz@localhost>]

der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost> writes:

>If I do the "do them all and instrument" thing, I may leave the 
>instrumentation infrastructure in place in the shipped version and provide a 
>way for people to turn it on and collect the data to figure otu which form of 
>compression works best for their particular application.

That'd be interesting data to have.

(I think that if people really want to squeeze out every byte, and in 
particular if they're dealing with lots of small packets like the keystrokes 
for this email where the headers are much larger than the data, the best 
option is to use a protocol-aware compressor like PPP's header compression, 
where you can reduce most of the packet header to a single flag 'same as the 
last packet', except for the length field.  Without thinking about it too much 
you could probably get the entire header into about 32 bits, including a flag 
for piggybacked window-adjusts to get rid of those as well.  OTOH how many
bytes to you really want to save in exchange for this protocol redesign?).

Peter.