Re: libfastmint update 20040915

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On Thu, 16 Sep 2004, Jonathan Morton wrote:

> The padding places the "tail" of the count field at byte 32 or 52 (mod 
> 64), which are the two most efficient places to calculate changes in 
> SHA-1 for. Most practical e-mail addresses will end up as 96-byte tokens 
> (32+64), though particularly short ones can be 52 bytes.  If the 
> extension field gets substantial use, 116-byte tokens may also become 
> common.
==============

there seems to be "dead spots" where some stamps are generated without a 
counter. these are tested using resources from 0-200 bytes with a 6 byte 
date and no extension. the file shows stamps that do not have a counter 
and the size of the resources used to create the stamps.
 	MD5 (stamps.gz) = c2e35a10d4b09c73cab049c631013df0


thoughts (after i should be in bed) about getting rid of the padding...

hhmmm... what if the padding was done internally? instead of padding the 
stamp that's output, a minting application would create a stamp _as_if_ it 
were padded and a verifying application would internally add appropriate 
padding before calculating the hash.

ok, this would break compatibility, and no one wants to rush and create a 
v2 stamp format... but an extension could exist for specifying the ~type~ 
of padding used (pad=x). this would still create a backwards compatibility 
issue, but if time passes before that behavior is turned on by default it 
shouldn't cause too many problems.

i'm going to bed soon... i promise.


         ...atom

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