Subject: Finalizing notary signatures

From: David Shaw <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 22:37:21 -0500

I'd like to start some discussion so we can finish the specification
of notary signatures.  There are still some missing pieces.

To recap, the notary signature is a signature on a signature, as if
made by a notary.  The notary should not need the original document,
the public key of the signer, or anything other than the signature
packet to issue the notary signature.

In <http://www.imc.org/ietf-openpgp/mail-archive/msg03987.html> Hal
Finney suggested a rule to canonicalize a signature packet so it can
be hashed and signed.  Paraphrased into RFC language, that is:

  When a signature is made over a signature, the hash data starts with
  the octet 0x88, followed by the four-octet length of the signature,
  and then the body of the signature packet.  (Note that this is an
  old-style packet header for a signature packet with the
  length-of-length set to zero).

I believe section 5.2.4. (Computing Signatures), would be the best
place for this.

David