Subject: Re: What happened to the OCSPv2 draft?

From: [email-masked] (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 02:18:23 +1200

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Michael_Str=F6der?= <[email-masked]> writes:

>So why use GeneralName at all? 
>Why use an flexible CHOICE data type and then restrict its use to a single
>variant?

I'm waiting for an RFC which starts with a SEQUENCE OF ANY, and the rest of the
RFC is a long list of things you're constrained from putting in there.  Come to
think of it, I might do that next April, the Grand Unified PKI RFC:

Protocol Overview

This RFC standardises a universal PKI protocol which may be described using the
following procedure:

1. Go to your nearest supermarket and purchase a packet of alphabet soup (if
   you already have alphabet soup in your larder, you may skip this step).
   
2. Following the instructions on the packet, make sufficient alphabet soup to
   feed the members of your household.

3. Plunge a standards-conformant spoon into the soup and extract a sequence
   (3...MAX, MAX = 6) letters from the soup.  This is the name of the PKI
   protocol which this RFC standardises.

4. Eat the alphabet soup (after writing down the protocol name).

Protocol Details

This protocol consists of a single PDU:

PDU ::= SEQUENCE OF ANY

The protocol is thus trivial to implement, and universally applicable, since
anyone can implement it in whichever way they choose, and no-one can feel their
idea of how a PKI protocol should work has been unfairly excluded.  This makes
it equivalent to many other PKI protocols, but without requiring pages and
pages of tedious specification to distract the reader.

[etc - I'll leave the rest till late March, because the compile has just
 finished]

Peter.

---

From: Michael Ströder <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 16:23:36 +0200

Peter Gutmann wrote:
> 
> I'm waiting for an RFC which starts with a SEQUENCE OF ANY,

Peter, this seems to simple. There should be at least one CHOICE and an 
OPTIONAL key word in there making it look more nested. ;-)

Ciao, Michael.

---

From: Phil Griffin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 11:16:29 -0400

Peter,

Make sure you encapsulate that ANY inside
of an OCTET STRING to make it lightweight
and simple ;-)

Phil

---

From: David Hopwood <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 00:36:53 +0000

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

> PDU ::= SEQUENCE OF ANY

I don't think this is sufficiently general: what if the PDU is more conveniently
represented as a SET or some other type? It should obviously be

MyProtocol DEFINITIONS AUTOMATIC TAGS ::= BEGIN
  PDU ::= CHOICE {
    aSequence    [42] SEQUENCE OF ANY,
    aSet              SET OF ANY,
    anythingElse      ANY,
    ... -- for future extensions
  } OPTIONAL (CONSTRAINED BY {-- the rest of this memo })
END

;-)

- -- 
David Hopwood <[email-masked]>

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