RE: iSCSI: BASE64 and numerical values

[Paul Koning <ni1d@arrl.net>]

Excerpt of message (sent 22 May 2002) by Bill Studenmund:
> Turns out CHAP needs strings, not numbers, so it is fine. I'm not sure
> about SRP, but from what I can tell, all of the other security methods
> will be exchanging (from iSCSI's point of view) binary strings.

Correct for SRP.  The RFC clearly states the mapping from numeric
values (in the mathematical statement of the algorithm) to strings (in
the protocol encodings); see pages 1-2.

If we were doing DH or RSA, large numbers might show up, but that
isn't currently an issue.  (And of course an octetstring is a
perfectly fine encoding for an integer, as soon as you specify the
byte order.)

      paul