enveloping, batching, signing

[Steve Allen]

With the galleys for the VOE/HTN conference paper on my desk I
find myself wondering about the implementation of digital signatures
for VOEvent, but also, more generally, about the use cases in the
era of Pan-STARRS and LSST.

If there be thousands of asteroid candidates daily, do we expect that
they will send out individual VOEvent packets for every single one?
(Maybe so, at least for the exceptional cases of imminent impactors,
but most cases will be main belt asteroids of no urgent interest.)
Are they going to prefer to process the night's worth of data
until they have a digested list of candidates and then send that
whole list out once daily as a huge batch?

So would it make more sense to define some sort of VOEvent envelope
into which arbitrary numbers of fully-formed VOEvent documents could
be transmitted?

If the latter, then the use case question for digital signing of the
VOEvents might be better if the envelope contains the signature which,
under most cases, would externally sign all of the VOEvent documents
in the envelope.  This would alleviate the need to include the
complexity of the W3C Signature element in the VOEvent proper, and it
would greatly simplify and speed the authentication process.

But in closing I note that if there are not two parties already
exchanging VOEvent packets who find utility in digital signing,
then there may not be enough justification to bother including
it at all.

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
UCO/Lick Observatory        Natural Sciences II, Room 165    Lat  +36.99855
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