Re: [Cbor] draft-ietf-cbor-network-addresses: tag validity; deterministic encoding

On 09-Oct-21 00:52, Carsten Bormann wrote:
> There are various admonitions scattered in draft-ietf-cbor-network-addresses about doing the right thing when encoding and decoding the tags.
> We do have a concept in CBOR to handle this properly:
> Tag validity (Section 5.3.2 of RFC8949).
> 
> In response to various observations about those admonitions during IESG 
processing, I went ahead and consolidated the actual content to a proper section about Tag Validity.
> 
> https://github.com/cbor-wg/cbor-network-address/pull/15
> 
> I also wrote:
> 
>> The tag validity rules, combined with the rules in {{Section 4.2.1 of
>> -cbor}}, lead to deterministic encoding for tags 54 and 52 and require
>> no further Additional Deterministic Encoding Considerations as per
>> {{Section 4.2.2 of -cbor}}.
> 
> … which might come in handy when deterministic encoding is actually needed.
> 
> Comments welcome before we merge.

I glanced at my Python code while checking the PR and noticed this:

>> A recommendation for prefix decoder implementations is to first create
>> an array of 16 (or 4) zero bytes.

That's exactly what I don't do in my code, although I'm sure it's exactly
what I would do in C. I think 'recommendation' is a bit strong.

>> check that any unused
>> bits in the byte string are zero:

I came up with this:

    if prefix[length//8] & bytemasks[length%8][0] != prefix[length//8]:
        #extra bits in prefix, signal an error

I also came up with a corner use case - suppose all I want to convey is
a prefix length but no prefix? At the moment, I simply send an all-zeroes
prefix, but those are wasted bits. Probably, this isn't worth fixing.

   Brian

> 
> Grüße, Carsten
> 
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