RE:are offsets enough? --was: (dictionary or not) Re: [dtn-security] 00 version of the Bundle Security Protocol Spec.

"Susan F. Symington" <susan@mitre.org> Wed, 25 May 2005 18:31 UTC

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From: "Susan F. Symington" <susan@mitre.org>
To: 'Michael Demmer' <demmer@cs.berkeley.edu>, dtn-security@mailman.dtnrg.org
Cc: 'Stephen Farrell' <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie>
Subject: RE:are offsets enough? --was: (dictionary or not) Re: [dtn-security] 00 version of the Bundle Security Protocol Spec.
Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 14:31:19 -0400
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> Personally, I think I'd rather that dictionary entries contain
> a length field (whatever encoding) since I've found lists of
> null-terminated strings are a great source for implementation
> errors.

Mike: Yeah -- I just feel like it's not worth the bytes. My other thought is
that we can infer the string lengths based on the various offsets
scattered throughout the bundle, in other words, if all the offsets
(i.e. src, dest, custodian, etc) were sorted, we could then infer the
various lengths based on the differences. But this is probably harder
to read (though more efficient) than just scanning for the null.

Susan: It occurs to me that when a bundle is fragmented, we won't always be
able to infer the various dictionary string lengths based on the various
offsets scattered through the bundle, because not all headers (and therefore
not all offsets) are guaranteed to be in every fragment.  The CH and PSH are
two examples of headers that may contain an offset but that most likely will
not be in every fragment. In the new FLAGS field we defined last week, one
bit is for indicating whether the header must be duplicated on all fragments
or just the first.  So, it seems like the PSH and CH may not be the only
examples. 

So, if terminating the strings with nulls is not sufficient, then it seems
we need something like a length field to go along with the offset.

-susan