"ISAKMP" flaws?

[Bill Stewart]

At 06:56 PM 11/18/2005, William Allen Simpson wrote:
>>| tromped around the office singing, "Every bit is sacred / Every bit
>>| is great / When a bit is wasted / Phil gets quite irate."
>....
>>| Consider this to be one of the prime things to correct. Personally,
>>| I think that numbers should never (well, hardly ever) be smaller
>>| than 32 bits.
>>(Jon Callas, 1997-08-08)
>Ah yes, a couple of years after Photuris.  And wasn't Jon the _author_
>of the PGP variable length integer specification?  Hoisted on his petard?

No, it was still Phil's old heavily-used petard,
worked over by various other people from PGP 3.0 and PGP Inc.
Jon was going for backwards compatibility in the OpenPGP specs.
He may have cleaned up the specs a bit,
and fixed some of the security holes from VL-integer exploits,
but unfortunately OpenPGP retained almost all the old ugliness.

I was always grumpy about the impossibility of doing stealth easily
in the native PGP formats and the fact that the OpenPGP code
fossilized it.  For political reasons I'd have also liked
PGP to have had an optional very simple format so you could
fit it into one page of Perl or equivalent to go with the
RSA in 4 lines of Perl or lisp.



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