Subject: issue 40 -- option ordering

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 16:58:24 +0200

> Section 5.1 seems to suggest that other options than CGA, Nonce,
> or Timestamp could be placed after the Signature option; however, 
> Section 5.3.1 says the Signature option MUST be the last option. 
> Perhaps 5.1 should be clarified?

Yes. Looking at Section 5.1:

> The CGA option MUST appear before the Signature option.

This requirement is redundant, as the Signature is last in
any case.

> The Nonce option SHOULD appear before the Timestamp option.

At first I thought this was a reasonable requirement. However, looking
at it in more detail, I'm not so sure anymore. Both options are
relatively simple to process, or at least the CPU usage for them is
not a DoS issue. So why require anything? And why require anything
with a SHOULD, since the receiver would have to have code to
handle the general case anyway?

> The Signature option MUST NOT be be followed CGA, Nonce, or
> Timestamp options.

Yet another case of redundancy in the draft.

> It is RECOMMENDED that the options appear in the following order:
> CGA, Nonce, Timestamp, Signature.

More redundancy...

My conclusion is that Section 5.1 is unnecessary and should
be removed. Comments?

--Jari

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