[Trans] Fwd: Comments on RFC6962

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

Sorry, gmail is behaving oddly today, it sent that message as I was typing.
The second odd thing it has done today.

I'll fix up that comment and put the rest in another message:


I am currently working on entering RFC6962 into my protocol compiler. This
has 'certain ideas' about regularity and conformance which is of course the
point of the exercise.

Some issues arising:

[Page 17]
      extensions:  An opaque type for future expansion.  It is likely
         that not all participants will need to understand data in this
         field.  Logs should set this to the empty string.  Clients
         should decode the base64-encoded data and include it in the
         SCT.

I have no idea why this would be needed. JSON allows any object to be
extended with arbitrary additional tags. I have no idea how this would be
used as well. There isn't a mechanism to tell the receiver what type of
data to expect.

If we did need to extend a message the way to do it would be to extend the
object with a new tag. JSON rules require the tag be ignored.

There is an open question on how to manage JSON extensibility. Some folk
are proposing going the XML route and an equivalent of the xmlns tag.
Reserved words are yucky and unnecessary though. If we want to use URIs as
a mechanism for describing an extension we can do that by using the URI as
a tag:

If the original message looks something like:

{ "a" : 1,
  "b" : 2 }

We can add a new tag for the FOO extension with unique identifier
urn:iana:someregistry:FOO as follows:

{ "a" : 1,
  "b" : 2,
  "urn:iana:someregistry:FOO ": { ... new object or data item here ...}
 }

This does not require us to do anything at the moment. It is a property of
JSON we can use if needed.


-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/