Subject: CRMF problems

From: Hans Schupp <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 13:59:12 +0200

Hello,

we just stepped over some possible problems with CRMF regInfo encoding.

The format of the regInfo-utf8Pairs value is defined in appendix B.1 to
be "[name?value][%name?value]*%", i.e. the percent sign is the delimiter
of each pair.

Two sentences later, the percent sign is "overloaded" to be used in the
escaping of reserved characters (with reference to URL-encoding).

IMHO this is a serious mistake and doesn't really work.
Is there already a fix/amendment, or did nobody come across this
problem  yet?

Why was such a kludge-like solution ([UTF-8]-encoding inside
[ASN.1]-encoding) chosen in the first place?

best regards,
Hans Schupp

PS: In RFC 2511, there is a slight inconsistency regarding the naming of
the following OID:
The first definition is
  id-regInfo-asciiPairs    OBJECT IDENTIFIER ::= { id-regInfo 1 }
later, it's defined as
  id-regInfo-utf8Pairs    OBJECT IDENTIFIER ::= { id-regInfo 1 }