MD5 proposal

>   From owner-db-wg at ripe.net Mon Mar 25 13:26:38 2002

Dear Andrei,

>   Please find enclosed the MD5 proposal for your comments and suggestions.

Great!

One small comment, probably need for clarification.

>   When submitting an update to the database that needs to be authorised using
>   this scheme, a "password:" pseudo-attribute must be used to submit a key
>   (passphrase). Line continuation is not allowed for this attribute, so the
>   whole key should fit on one line.

Let's suppose I send in a message with
password:   Hello
(note the three spaces).

It is not clear to me where the passphrase would start. I can think of
two valid approaches:
1. At the first character after the first white space (space or tab)
following the colon (":") (in my example the passphrase would be then
"  Hello").
2. At the first non-whitespace character after the colon (in which case
the passphrase would be "Hello").

I think I would vote for the second approach which is more intuitive
to me. BTW: how does this work with CRYPT-PW? I would think it is the
second approach.

Best regards,
Janos

PS: I apologize if this is specified somewhere.