GnuPG can't handle some V3 secret keys

[Peter Gutmann]

Florian Weimer <Florian.Weimer at RUS.Uni-Stuttgart.DE> writes:

>As you all might know, the OpenPGP standard mandates (recommends?) that multi-
>precision integers (MPIs) are stored in the shortest possible way, i.e. that
>leading zeroes are stripped.  However, there are exceptions, namely encrypted
>MPIs inside V3 secret key packets. These can contain leading zeroes, and in
>fact do so sometimes. For example, the encrypted d RSA parameter might look
>like
>
>        03 ff 00 c5
>
>and so on.

Could this be a side-effect of use with ASN.1, where integers are signed and
need to be encoded with a leading zero if the high bit is set?  Or is it just
people padding them out to n bits with zeroes if necessary?

Peter.