[lisp] Paul Wouters' Discuss on draft-ietf-lisp-name-encoding-11: (with DISCUSS)

[Paul Wouters via Datatracker <[e-mail]>]

Paul Wouters has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-lisp-name-encoding-11: Discuss

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DISCUSS:
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Thanks to Rich Salz for his SecDir review. I strongly agree with his comments.

The core problem of this document is that it specifies a namespace without
specifying the rules of the namespace. Saying "ASCII" is not a proper specification.

Is Distinguished Name (DN) the same as the X.509 meaning? I cannot tell
from its IANA registry allocation as all that is listed there is an email
address? :/

If so, their format is not "ASCII", eg it is more something
like:

"a string consisting of a sequence of attribute type/value pairs
separated by a semicolon (';' U+003B)'.

Sometimes comma's are also considered. It also allows non-ASCII
values. What about unprintable ASCII values, eg value 0x07 which
is "audible bell" ? Is "ietf.name" the same as "IETF.name" ?

Why not UTF8? Or if this is deemed to have the "hierarchical properties"
of DNS names, why not Punycode ?

Diagram section 3 is wrongly formatted. It shows a two octet AFI field,
followed by a two octet ASCII field, followed by a 23 bit ASCII field,
followed by a 9 bit "0" field ? But the description and text does not
support this.

Is the "." a special character ? Or "," or ";" (both used as separators
of DNs in X.509), how about a space/tab? Or a dot (") ? Is backslash (\)
used for masking? Is \\ supported to denote a backslash?

The example uses mask to split a string on dot, eg "ietf.name". Is a mask on
a non-dot valid? What would "ie" or "tf.name" mean?


"There are no security considerations."

What about mask-len's outside the ASCII string?
What about mask-len pointing at the 0 octet?
What about strings without trailing 0 octet?
What about similar looking strings?
What about privacy concerns for strings?
What about indistinguishable Distinguished Name?
What about a NULL name of length 1?
What about an invalid length 0 that cannot include the 0 octet ?
What about excessively long length or mask specifications?
What about matching case sensitive or insensitive?
What about special ASCII characters?