Re: [Emu] EAP and UTF-8

["Josh Howlett" <Josh.Howlett at ja.net>]

> > > Yes, I'd be very happy if supplicants did that. Obviously some 
> > > refrained from doing it so far, and I don't think there 
> is a lot of 
> > > incentive to make them change their code if we can't even 
> rightfully 
> > > claim that the current behaviour is violating the EAP RFC.
> > 
> > Is there a good reason *not* to change the RFC to stipulate 
> UTF-8? (I 
> > can't see that this would break anything)
> 
> I suppose that we could also propose new RFC boilerplate 
> saying something like "IF YOU ARE A MORON DON'T IMPLEMENT 
> THIS SPECIFICATION." but I don't think it would do much good. 

I don't think this is a question of anyone being a moron. The supplicant
implementors read the spec, noticed that it did not recommended or
stipulate any particular encoding, and therefore (ab)used the subsequent
wriggle-room to do their own thing - while still observing both the
letter and spirit of the spec.

>  RFC 4282 already allows UTF-8 for NAIs that cannot be 
> represented in ASCII.  If a supplicant doesn't use it, it's a 
> bug in the supplicant implementation, not in the NAI 
> specification, let alone EAP or .1X.  

This would be a supplicant bug if the spec stipulated an encoding, and
the implementors ignored it. This isn't the case, and so IMHO the
encoding needs to be constrained so that we get the deterministic
behaviour that Stefan alluded to previously.

josh.


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