Re: [Issue] Special Characters in RFC 2486bis

[Jari Arkko <jari.arkko@piuha.net>]

> I have to handle the Network Access Identifier (NAI) for my work. I have
> read the RFC 2486 and I'm a little confused about the use of special
> characters,
> like  "<" / ">" / "(" / ")" / "[" / "]" / "\" / "."  / "," / ";" / ":" /
> "@" / %x22  / Ctl,
>
> in the NAI username.
>
> Can you help me? Can you please give some examples of valid NAI containing
> special characters?

The issue is what "special" characters, not just alphabets
and digits can appear in NAIs. The realm part rules are
according to the usual DNS, which I think allows only "-"
and ".". The user name part allows more special characters,
but disallows some others. A couple of valid examples:

    jari_arkko@ericsson.com
    user%%%%%@example.com

A couple of invalid examples:

    jari.arkko@ericsson.com
    user>luser@example.com

Nevertheless, there's an escape mechanism that allows
even special characters. Example:

    jari\.arkko@ericsson.com

If you read the new draft at

  http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-radext-rfc2486bis-01.txt

you will see that the ABNF syntax is hopefully easier to read
than in RFC 2486, because the treatment of each character has
been listed on its own line, and you do not have read the
comments to find out what actual characters are allowed.

Hope this helps,

Jari

--
to unsubscribe send a message to radiusext-request@ops.ietf.org with
the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body.
archive: <http://psg.com/lists/radiusext/>