Re: discuss: draft-ietf-pkix-pi-07.txt

[Leslie Daigle <leslie@thinkingcat.com>]

Sorry -- I was away from my inbox for just over 24 hours,
and didn't catch up with this before the call.

My argument then was:  the value is either an OID or a URI,
which (by definition of those identifiers) means that, in fact,
they will be ascii strings.

I remain concerned that the people writing this document don't
understand URIs well enough, and may be thinking that IRIs
(like URIs, but using UTF-8) will be plug-and-play compatible
with this spec.  A) they won't be and B) *then* you get the
heartache of internationalized string comparision.

See my notes of April 15, 16 and 24, subject
"Re: Evaluation: draft-ietf-pkix-pi - Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Permanent Identifier to Proposed Standard"

Leslie.




Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> In message <E1A9xFi-000ERu-KT@roam.psg.com>, Randy Bush writes:
>
> > the rfc-ed has their job cut out for them.
> >
> > ---
> >
> > i think there are some rituals that have to be followed re utf8, and
> > they are not being followed.  but i am not an expert in this.  e.g. i
> > suspect this is deadly
> >
> >     The Alphanumeric Identifier Match rule compares for equality a
> >     presented value with an attribute value of type UTF8String 
> >     or IA5String, which is interpreted as a series of alphanumeric 
> >     characters.  The rules for matching are that a working comparison 
> >     value is constructed from each of the two values by including 
> >     only the digits and alphabetic characters appearing in the value; 
> >     and then the two comparison values are compared using 
> >     CaseIgnoreMatch.  This rule is intended for use only with 
> >     identifiers in variants of the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts.
>
>
> I raised that issue the first time we saw that document.  If I recall 
> correctly, Leslie -- who knows far more about that stuff than I do -- 
> persuaded me that it wasn't a problem here.
>
> 		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb


--

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"Reality:
    Yours to discover."
                               -- ThinkingCat
Leslie Daigle
leslie@thinkingcat.com
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