Recursive operations
A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security (PADGETT@hobbes.orl.mmc.com)
Sun, 25 Feb 1996 11:32:39 -0500 (EST)
> Don Eastlake elicited one of the day's few outbursts of applause
>when he observed that a benefit of Multipart/Encrypted is that it is a
>generic flag to the MIME processing engine that a recursive object is being
>processed. That is, the MIME engine needs to pass the content on to an
>external application, but then needs to take the result BACK and process it
>further, as MIME content.
> (Ed. Note: On its face, this flexibility might well seem to be too
>esoteric to be of real and practical benefit.
I disagree, this is a very important point (and really wish I had been there.
Essentillaly this is the functionality that was added when MS-DOS received
the CALL statement. Perhaps it would be good to examine the alternative: if
this did not occur, it would be the responsibility of the encryption
engine/user to figure out what to do with the result. The reuturn capability
permits the program which calls the encryption engine to decide what is to
be done with the output just as it would have if it had received plain text
in the first place.
Since the ability to process the cleartext had to be in the calling program
in the first place, anything else would represent a duplication of effort
and would probably present the user with different screens/choices depending
on whether the original message was encrypted. The simplest solution is to
return the cleartext to the calling routine.
Warmly,
Padgett