Signing/Encrypting XML

The Jester (ygoland@cinenet.net)
Sun, 31 Jan 1999 22:31:15 -0800 (PST)


I was reading the SDSI 2.0 spec
(http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~cis/sdsi/sdsi2/sdsi20_toc.html) and SPKI
(http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/spki-charter.html). As much as I dearly
love s-expressions it doesn't appear that they have fully grasped the
importance of namespaces or the versioning power of the WebDAV XML ignore
rule. So it would appear that they need (please... oh universe... forgive
me) XML and the WebDAV XML ignore rule.

We could, of course, just enhance their s-expressions to be the equivalent
of XML (SDL to my friends) but I already have enough battles on my plate
and I have decided to let this one slide.

Which brings me to my question, does anyone know of any work to define a
canonical form for XML so as to make it suitable for hashing, needed to
generate signatures? Better yet, does anyone know of any code (preferably
in Java) which will take XML (preferably from the DOM) and output the
canonical form?

Yaron