Subject: [precis] I-D Action: draft-ietf-precis-7613bis-01.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 05 May 2016 10:42:44 -0700

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
This draft is a work item of the Preparation and Comparison of Internationalized Strings of the IETF.

        Title           : Preparation, Enforcement, and Comparison of Internationalized Strings Representing Usernames and Passwords
        Authors         : Peter Saint-Andre
                          Alexey Melnikov
	Filename        : draft-ietf-precis-7613bis-01.txt
	Pages           : 25
	Date            : 2016-05-05

Abstract:
   This document describes updated methods for handling Unicode strings
   representing usernames and passwords.  The previous approach was
   known as SASLprep (RFC 4013) and was based on stringprep (RFC 3454).
   The methods specified in this document provide a more sustainable
   approach to the handling of internationalized usernames and
   passwords.  The preparation, enforcement, and comparison of
   internationalized strings (PRECIS) framework, RFC 7564, obsoletes RFC
   3454, and this document obsoletes RFC 7613.

The IETF datatracker status page for this draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-precis-7613bis/

There's also a htmlized version available at:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-precis-7613bis-01

A diff from the previous version is available at:
https://www.ietf.org/rfcdiff?url2=draft-ietf-precis-7613bis-01

Please note that it may take a couple of minutes from the time of submission
until the htmlized version and diff are available at tools.ietf.org.

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/

---

From: Sam Whited <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 May 2016 09:43:10 -0500

Hi Peter et al.

Here are some notes I took while reading through the 7613 draft last
night; a few of them are actual issues, and others are probably just
me misunderstanding something:

- §3 defines Usernames, but since I was expecting a PRECIS profile
that defined a username it was confusing and I didn't really
understand it at first (until I got to §3.5 which explained the
difference between user parts and usernames). I'm not sure if this
could be made clearer or not, or if it was just me.
- Nit: §3.2.4 reads "An entity that performs comparison of two strings
according to this profile MUST prepare each string as specified in
Section 3.2.2 and then enforce the rules specified in Section 3.2.3".
Though redundant, it might make sense to modify it to read "and then
MUST enforce the rules" as well. Not sure that it matters, but it was
unclear to me on first reading (though I figured it out pretty
quickly; others probably wouldn't have been tripped up by this).
- §3.3.3 says that the Case-mapping rule should be performed as the
third step of Enforcement, but there is no case mapping rule for the
profile. This step should probably be removed or clarified (eg. is
case mapping optional, or is it required that you don't do it? I'm not
clear on how the absense of a rule works in a profile in general).
- Table 2 says "A localpart of BLACK CHESS KING". Localpart is an XMPP
term and should read "Userpart" in this context
- Nit: §4.2.2 lists the Case mapping rule as "Uppercase and titlecase
characters MUST NOT be mapped…", but other profiles just say there is
no case mapping rule. Similar to the above, if there's a difference
(especially within a single document), I think it could use some
clarification. Although I'm not sure that it matters, as
implementations are likely to just leave off case mapping either way,
which I think is the expected behavior in both cases?
- §6.1 references Unicode 7.0, if an update to the RFC is being
proposed, this could be changed to read 8.0.0 (or removed if the issue
is no longer a problem), or it could be left alone, probably doesn't
really matter.
- §6.1 also says "these code points would have been "mapped to
nothing" in stringprep, in practice a user would not notice the
difference if, upon migration to PRECIS, the code points are
removed.". Is this correct? Would this not make the username invalid
because the code points aren't allowed in the identifier class,
locking them out of their account? I'm probably missing something
here.
- §6.2 Another possible place to update a Unicode 7 reference to 8.0.0

Best,
Sam

On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 12:42 PM,  <[email-masked]> wrote:
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-- 
Sam Whited
pub 4096R/54083AE104EA7AD3
https://blog.samwhited.com