Subject: RE: [AAA-WG]: Issue 357: Inappropriate UTF-8 encoding (fwd)

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2002 11:54:38 +0300

Hi!

Bernard Aboba wrote:
> 1. Change the following AVPs that use UTF8String to type 
> DiameterIdentity:
> 
> Origin-Realm AVP (6.4)
> Destination-Realm AVP (6.6)
> 
> 2. Change the definition of DiameterIdentity to OctetString.

Shouldn't DiameterIdentity, i.e. fqdn still be considered "text"?

If the fqdn is not UTF-8 encoded I think it should be ASCII encoded.
Data contained in AVP-type derived from OctetString does not necessarily
contain ASCII encoded data.

Or am I missing something here?

BR,
Mikko

---

From: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2002 04:48:05 -0700 (PDT)

That was my original suggestion, but Eric Brunner-Williams provided us
with some background on how this has been handled in the past. Do you have
a suggestion for additional text that would make this more clear?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 10:44:32 -0400
From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
To: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [AAA-WG]: Issue 357: Inappropriate UTF-8 encoding

Bernard,

As an alternative, I suggest the DiameterIdentity type can be left
simply as an OctetString AVP, and reference to any charset dropped.
If you want to add details to how the DiameterIdentity value is to
be used, e.g., case-insensitive character comparison for octets in
the range 0-127, that would be consistent with 10[34/35].

The same issue came up recently in dnsext (unknown RDATA formats).

The same issue has been present in provreg (character encodings other
than UTF-8 (and UTF-16) are allowed by XML, if an encoding attribute,
or a byte order mark, or both is present, EPP is specified in XML
Schema notation, and is silent on the use of character encodings other
than UTF-8 except "in environments where parser encoding support
incompatibility might have an impact on interoperability", in which
case UTF-8 is RECOMMENDED).

Eric