losing meaningful whitespaces in an encrypted file

[Paladino, Vanda K]

Thanks for your quick replies.  I actually drafted that message last
week but just managed to get it to go through today, so I do have some
more information.

I've gotten someone over here to help me a  bit, and we've run some
tests.

Our file is being encrypted with gpg version 1.2.6

We had them send us an encrypted file and we decrypted it using gpg
version 1.4.5 and the spaces were missing.  We decrypted it with PGP as
well, and the spaces were also missing, not sure what version of PGP
that was, I can find out.

I did originally go to the PGP people for help, and they, of course,
sent me over here :)

But it is starting to seem like the problem is on our side, which would
be the gpg side of the issue.

Vanda

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert J. Hansen [mailto:rjh at sixdemonbag.org] 
Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 10:41 AM
To: Paladino, Vanda K
Cc: gnupg-users at gnupg.org
Subject: Re: losing meaningful whitespaces in an encrypted file

paladino wrote:
> When I look at the file here, immediately before it is encrypted, the 
> 13 white spaces are still there. When I look at the file at the 
> vendor, immediately after decryption, the 13 spaces are gone.

Have you tried a test decryption on your end?  E.g., encrypt the file
with your own public key and then decrypt that, and see whether the 13
spaces are present?

Also, version numbers would be very useful--both GnuPG on your end and
PGP on the vendor's end.

This may very well be a PGP problem as opposed to a GnuPG problem, in
which case you may be better served on a PGP list such as PGP-Basics at
Yahoo! Groups.

> Is there anything obvious that could be causing something like this?  
> Which end is it more likely the problem is at?

Impossible to say without more information.  My inclination is to think
it's probably on the vendor's end, especially if you're using a recent
version of GnuPG.  There are a lot of PGP 5.0 and 6.5.8 installations
out there, and both of them substantially predate the OpenPGP standard
which GnuPG conforms to.