detached signature, "can't hash datafile: No data"

Robert J. Hansen rjh at sixdemonbag.org
Sat Jan 1 05:12:16 CET 2022


> Shouldn't I be able to verify the signature independently?

Why?

A signature is a piece of data that attests another piece of data is 
unchanged.  If it doesn't have a second piece of data to compare to, all 
it can say is "I have a good digital signature that attests to a hash 
value of XYZ for some piece of data, but, uh ... where's the data?"

Detached signatures (clearsign signatures being one kind of them) do not 
include the original data.  You can sign gigabytes of data and the 
detached signature will still be only a few hundred bytes in size, 
because the original data isn't there.

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