ietf-dkim
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Re: [ietf-dkim] Internationalized domain names

2006-07-19 22:03:44

On Jul 19, 2006, at 4:20 PM, Paul Hoffman wrote:

At 4:08 PM -0700 7/19/06, Douglas Otis wrote:
On Jul 19, 2006, at 10:29 AM, Paul Hoffman wrote:


No, that's wrong: only the labels that have non-LDH characters are converted. Section 4 in IDNA covers this correctly.

Good point, but not exactly right either.

Please show *exactly* where the following is "not exactly right":
       Internationalized domain names MUST be converted using
       the  steps in section 4 of [RFC3490] using the ToASCII
       function.

The term "internationalized domain name" covers more than just unicode.

Per RFC3490:
,--
| An "internationalized domain name" (IDN) is a domain name in which
| every label is an internationalized label.  This implies that every
| ASCII domain name is an IDN (which implies that it is possible for a
| name to be an IDN without it containing any non-ASCII characters).
'__

Without reviewing the mapping of the ASCII code points, limitations expressed by this statement are not apparent and further depend upon several other documents. In addition, few are as familiar with IDNA as you, being one of the authors. This IDNA spec defines the operation of a translation shim between an application and underlying infrastructure dependent upon how the string is used. Technically, this IDNA RFC has little to do with DKIM and offers an awkward way to define a character set and a domain label limitation without further clarifications. A concise way of expressing this definition is to provide the ABNF character set permitted for use within the i= parameter. When the d= parameter is an IDN, it does not matter with respect to the function of DKIM and is completely irrelevant.

Unfortunately label definitions within STD13 (RFC1034) have changed somewhat. The current sub-domain ABNF referenced from RFC2821 appears to be insufficient, however an IDN represents just a sub-set of this definition. It would also appear on closer review, the RFC3490 reference offers little additional clarity. DKIM should better define the sub-domain ABNF instead.

ABNF:

letter = %x41-5A | %x61-7A ; A-Z | a-z
digit  = %x30-39 ; 0-9
hyphen = %x2D ; "-"
ldh = letter | digit | hyphen
let-dig = letter | digit
sub-domain =  let-dig [*61 ldh let-dig]

-Doug







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