Renaming AES to AES-128

Bernhard Reiter bernhard at intevation.de
Wed Dec 15 10:06:17 CET 2010


Am Freitag, 10. Dezember 2010 20:53:30 schrieb Werner Koch:
> On Fri, 10 Dec 2010 19:37, rjh at sixdemonbag.org said:
> > The problem is we don't know how many third-party apps are hardwired to
> > expect "AES" instead of "AES-128."  I suspect the answer is "a lot more
> > than we think."

They SHOULD use the algorithm id, I presume.
Maybe we can make this a stronger requirement or recommendation
for the future. I something believe that we should be able to change
the string representation without major problems at least at major revisions.
Third party applications would then need to adjust. 

> In particular interpretive languages often prefer the use of strings to
> identifiers.  Thus a
>   if algo = "AES" then keysize = 128
> would fail.

This makes two assumptions that this code should not do, once it does not use 
the algo id and secondly it uses internal knowledge of what this string will
lead do, aka guessing the keysize. I believe a lot of the design should be 
done that frontends to not do too much guessing here, otherwise they will 
have to expect to change sooner or later.

> In any case I changed the human readable output and that should fix the
> problems some people have with the way the algorithm name is printed.

Wonderful!
Bernhard

-- 
Managing Director - Owner: www.intevation.net       (Free Software Company)
Deputy Coordinator Germany: fsfe.org. Board member: www.kolabsys.com.
Intevation GmbH, Osnabrück, DE; Amtsgericht Osnabrück, HRB 18998
Geschäftsführer Frank Koormann, Bernhard Reiter, Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner
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