Re: Cohen's paper on byte order

From: Eugene Starokoltsev (eugene_o@gmx.net)
Date: 04/09/03 

From: eugene_o@gmx.net (Eugene Starokoltsev)
Date: 9 Apr 2003 08:06:19 -0700

Bryan Olson <fakeaddress@nowhere.org> wrote in message news:<2Lxka.690$9S5.553@newssvr16.news.prodigy.com>...
> Eugene Starokoltsev wrote:
> > It is not a problem of AES. It is a problem
> > of qualification of that peoples as computer engineers.
>
> I expect engineers will infer the intended bit-order from FIPS-
> 197.

And make mistake. IMHO computer engineer must understand difference
between external interface of a system and it's internal
implementation.

> No, MD5 also covers octet-strings, as I already pointed out in
> the predecessor to this thread:
>
> A sequence of bits can be interpreted in a natural manner as
> a sequence of bytes, where each consecutive group of eight
> bits is interpreted as a byte with the high-order (most
> significant) bit of each byte listed first. [RFC 1321,
> section 2]
>
> FIPS-197 should include a similar statement to avoid technical
> ambiguity.

I do not think it is a part of MD5 external interface. First of all it
states mapping from bit stream to bytes for internal operations
definition. While this does creates opposite mapping too it is
indirect definition only.

In any case RFC 1321 is not a FIPS.