Re: [Anima] Content-Transfer-Encoding and HTTP 1.x in ANIMA BRSKI

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 17.06.2019 22:44, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 18-Jun-19 05:18, Panos Kampanakis (pkampana) wrote:
>>> So effectively, the CTE header has effectively been dropped, but the payload is now assumed to be base64, regardless.
>>> This suggests that we can not use the CTE header as a signal.
>
> I went and looked at RFC4648 for my own education, and then spent a few minutes
> trying to design a Turing machine that can distinguish a binary bit string from
> a base64 bit string. Fail. You can determine that a bit string is definitely
> not base64 if it contains at least one character outside the base64 alphabet,
> but not the converse. So it needs a signal. Not having a signal would be wide
> open to malicious misuse, IMHO. Indicating the length of the payload would be
> enough, I think.

I agree that using heuristics should be avoided. But how does
Content-Length help here?

Best regards, Julian