On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 01:15:33PM +0000, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Jan 2003, Matthew Toseland wrote:
> 
> > > When you say powers of two - does that mean that a 5 KB file will be 
> > > rounded to 8 KB? Or be split into 4 KB and 1 KB? If it is split, at what 
> > 
> > Rounded.
> 
> I just realized something. If files are rounded to the size which is the 
> next power of 2, doesn't that mean that in the worst case, where the file 
> has size n bytes, wasted space is anything up to (n-1) bytes? And in the 
> average case (n/2) bytes? Is this space actually wasted? Is the empty 
> space padded with zeros or random data?
No, the worst case is n/2. The average case is 3n/4. Unless we are
talking about the source document being below the minimum 1kB.
> 
> I can see that this prevents any data size analysis attack on the network 
> (i.e. key sizes are not indicative of content by their size), but if the 
> data is encrypted, the padding with random data would probably be more 
> desireable as plain zeros would introduce some level of entropy...
We do, I think.
> 
> How far off the mark am I here?
> 
> Regards.
> 
> Gordan

-- 
Matthew Toseland
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