Re: MD5 Digest auth and other things...

["Roy T. Fielding" <fi...@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU>]

> I hope to have a new version of the modifications available later this 
> evening. And I may take out the Content-MD5 header stuff. Does anyone see 
> any real use for this? There isn't any real description I could find 
> anywhere, save an example in the HTTP 1.1 draft (the actual section on 
> Content-MD5 is marked "TBS"), so I'm a bit wary of including it. I only 
> did because NCSA 1.5.1 has it, albiet only active with a #define. We can 
> always put it back later, yes?

Calculating the MD5 is an expensive process, like parsing for META, and
thus should only be done if there is some kind of caching of the
values (as in a meta table, or .meta files).  In general, it would only
be generated by servers that *really* care about message integrity
or which already know it for free.

Content-MD5 is defined by RFC 1864 <http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1864.txt>

....Roy

Re: MD5 Digest auth and other things...

[Alexei Kosut <ak...@nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us>]

On Thu, 21 Mar 1996, Roy T. Fielding wrote:

> Calculating the MD5 is an expensive process, like parsing for META, and
> thus should only be done if there is some kind of caching of the
> values (as in a meta table, or .meta files).  In general, it would only
> be generated by servers that *really* care about message integrity
> or which already know it for free.

Right. The only reason I put the config option into the patch was because
it was a couple extra lines, and someone might actually find it useful. I
wasn't planning on documenting it much or at all. But I don't think it 
hurts anything. (if it does, I'll take it out) You're right though that 
.meta files are certainly a more efficient way of doing this.

> Content-MD5 is defined by RFC 1864 <http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1864.txt>

Thanks.

--// Alexei Kosut // <ak...@nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us> // Lefler on IRC --//
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