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Re: [http-auth] Pete Resnick's No Objection on draft-ietf-httpauth-basicauth-update-06: (with COMMENT)

Barry Leiba <barryleiba@computer.org> Wed, 18 February 2015 23:43 UTC

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From: Barry Leiba <barryleiba@computer.org>
To: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@greenbytes.de>
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Cc: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, Pete Resnick <presnick@qti.qualcomm.com>, httpauth-chairs@ietf.org, "http-auth@ietf.org" <http-auth@ietf.org>, The IESG <iesg@ietf.org>, draft-ietf-httpauth-basicauth-update.all@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [http-auth] Pete Resnick's No Objection on draft-ietf-httpauth-basicauth-update-06: (with COMMENT)
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>> "MUST NOT" does not mean the Internet Police will come to take you away.
>> "MUST NOT" means "this won't work".
>
> Ahem, no, that's not what "MUST NOT" means.

It is, modulo rhetoric.  It's an interoperability requirement.  "You
MUST NOT do <x>," means that if you do <x>, you will not interoperate
-- something will break.  It seems to me that that's exactly the case
here: If my username is "b:leiba", and a client sends "b:leiba:plugh",
many servers will think the username is "b" and the password is
"leiba:plugh".  That means that allowing ":" in the username breaks
interoperability.  Whether or not it works sometimes, and whether or
not implementations currently *do* this are irrelevant.  The point is
that the right definition of the protocol is that you "MUST NOT have a
colon character in the username."

Barry

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