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Re: [ietf-dkim] RFC4871bis - whether to drop -- k: Key type

2009-06-01 12:46:42

On Jun 1, 2009, at 8:41 AM, Siegel, Ellen wrote:


  TXT RR tags

    k: Key type

Much the same as h=, with the added issue that there's only one
possible key type right now, and if there were a need for k= in the
future it could be added in the same RFC that adds support for
anything other than RSA.

Dropping this to remove clutter seems like a reasonable idea, but it  
would be necessary to meet a couple of conditions to prevent  
breakage due to the number of existing records with this tag.

      - implementations would have to ignore any tags they don't  
recognize (this should already be required, so should be no problem)

      - if this functionality is added back in later, it needs to be done  
in a way that breaks neither records with k tags nor records without  
a key type specifier (again, backwards compatibility requirements  
should make this obvious, but if enough time elapses it's possible  
people will forget about the existing k tags).

I would assume that if it were added back it would look exactly like it
does now, but with some additional options other than "rsa".

Adding k= back or extending it to support other options would
both require RFC level effort, so I'd expect anyone doing that
would do the research on the history (or, more likely, be on
this mailing list right now :) ).

Cheers,
   Steve

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