Re: [PATCH] base32, base64: disallow non-canonical encodings

[Simon Josefsson]

Pádraig Brady <P@draigBrady.com> writes:

> However if there are good use-cases for bad inputs
> we may need to adjust this patch,
> rather than failing unconditionally.
>
> For example we could just flag non canonical input in the context,
> and leave it up to the caller how to deal with that.

That adds complexity -- I'd prefer to just default to fail and see if we
get complaints.

> It would be good to know an example of good use-cases
> for bad inputs though, as I can't think of any.

The simplest example of good use-case is to be able to decode existing
incorrectly formatted inputs.  However I think this is one that could be
defered to other tools for that purpose, since generally this is not a
trivial feature and it is a slippery slope to support all needs.

This may becomes a problem if user failure happens at a very high level
and doing the low-level base64-decoding separately is not feasible in an
application, but let's see...

/Simon

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