losing meaningful whitespaces in an encrypted file

Paladino, Vanda K vbushfield at purdue.edu
Tue Sep 11 13:20:12 CEST 2007


Sorry I don't know why that took so long to get through, and I also
apologize for the multiple posts of the same message.  I was using a
funky web interface to your mailing list and it seems to not like me
very much.

As clarification on the original issue, we weren't sending it as text,
we were sending it as a binary file.

However, we did finally at least partially identify our problem.

Version 1.2.6 for Linux strips our end of line white spaces.
Version 1.2 for Unix does not.

We'll be going back to using our Unix machine to do the encrypting until
we can upgrade or downgrade as necessary to find a linux version that
behaves properly.

Thanks to everyone here who helped me out via private email to narrow
down the solution.

Vanda Paladino 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Shaw [mailto:dshaw at jabberwocky.com] 
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2007 8:55 PM
To: Paladino, Vanda K
Cc: Robert J. Hansen; gnupg-users at gnupg.org
Subject: Re: losing meaningful whitespaces in an encrypted file

Again, this is not a bug, but a documented part of the protocol.
There are ways around it, and the details on this will be changing in
the future, but at least for today, if you send files as text, you will
lose end-of-line whitespace.

David

On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 10:52:18AM -0400, Paladino, Vanda K wrote:
> 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.
> 
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> 



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