[abfab] escaping in ABFAB names

Sam Hartman <hartmans@painless-security.com> Wed, 18 July 2012 20:18 UTC

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From: Sam Hartman <hartmans@painless-security.com>
To: abfab@ietf.org
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 16:18:44 -0400
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Subject: [abfab] escaping in ABFAB names
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Hi.  One of the comments from the secdir review is that we have no way
to escape a slash or @ inside an ABFAB name.  For reference, Kerberos
does have such a mechanism.

I think we at least discussed this in a meeting.

It's much easier to add an escaping mechanism now if we're going to need
it.

I can't think of a reason you'd need such an escaping mechanism in
practice except:

1) To represent Kerberos enterprise names in ABFAB. I cannot think of
why you'd need to do that.

2) To represent pathalogical hostnames or Kerberos names in ABFAB. I
cannot think of why you'd need to do that.

I think that when this was discussed in a meeting people expressed a
preference for simplicity over escaping.  Personally I'm a bit nervous
that we may regret this decision no matter which way we decide.

--Sam