Subject: Re: Let's finish up 0x50 "notary" signatures

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 15:52:38 -0800

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 14:25:17 -0800 David Shaw <[email-masked]>
wrote:

>A notary can issue a notary signature on any signature, which includes
>key certifications.  Placing the notary signature in a
>signature-in-a-subpacket on the unhashed area of the original
>signature would be an effective way of transporting the notary sig
>around with the key.

could this be done in a way that existing implementations can just
'ignore' (i.e., not 'choke' on) the notary signature if it can't 'recognize'
what it is,  when importing a key with a notary signature on the self-
signed sig of the key?

vedaal

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---

From: David Shaw <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 19:37:20 -0500

On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 03:52:38PM -0800, [email-masked] wrote:

> 'ignore' (i.e., not 'choke' on) the notary signature if it can't
> 'recognize' what it is, when importing a key with a notary signature
> on the self- signed sig of the key?

Yes, existing implementations should ignore and certainly not choke on
any unrecognized signature subpacket.  If the signer chooses to, they
can set the "critical" flag, which requests that an implementation
fail the signature verification for unrecognized signature
subpackets, but at the same time, they don't have to.  It's up to the
signer what they want to happen.

(It is a different issue altogether whether a critical bit on an
*unhashed* subpacket should cause this to happen, though!)

David