Subject: [sidr] draft-ietf-sidr-signed-object-01 issue

From: Rob Austein <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2010 18:17:45 -0500

This one should be an easy fix, but it's not just a nit.

This draft over-specifies the eContent field.  Specifically: section
2.1.3.2 requires that the outermost level of the eContent must be an
ASN.1 SEQUENCE the first field of which must be a version number.
This is a layer violation.  There is no need for the signed-object
draft to specify this, and there are cases where this is a bad idea.

Case in point would be the proposed ghostbusters record.  The real
payload is a vCard.  The ASN.1 wrapper adds nothing but the mandatory
ASN.1 version number, to no real purpose.

Without the ASN.1 wrapper, one could use an off-the-shelf CMS tool to
extract the eContent, then feed that into an off-the-shelf vCard
parser.   With the wrapper, one has to write custom code just to
extract the vCard from the wrapper.  This is silly.

Version numbers are fine in cases where they make sense, but imposing
then everywhere does not.  If there ever turns out to be a real need
to make an incompatible change to something like the ghostbusters
record, we could always allocate a new eContentType OID, it's not like
OIDs are a scarce resource.

Requested change: remove all specification of the eContent payload
from this template, leave that for the object-specific documents that
reference it.  This will also require removing a few of comments
scattered here and there in the draft which appear to assume that the
content will always be ASN.1.