ietf-openpgp
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: bis05: Armor Headers

2002-04-30 10:54:55

On Tue, Apr 30, 2002 at 05:09:32PM +0200, Marc Mutz wrote:

I've looked through bis05 and I think the wording on non-US-ASCII characters 
in armor headers is still too vague.

1. It's not only the Comment field that is affected here. IIRC, GnuPG uses 
non-us-ascii characters for the version header if localized, too.
2. An implementation allowing full UTF-8 in the Armor Headers indirectly 
violates rfc3156.

I'd really like to see that Armor Headers MUST (at least SHOULD) be 
constrained to US-ASCII, except in clearsigning, where the full UTF-8 may be 
used since the enclosed text is already UTF-8.

The other way round: If exporting keys with armor or creating an armored 
detached signature, all armor headers MUST be constrained to US-ASCII.

I agree with Marc.  I'd even go further and say for the sake of
simplicity that all armor headers MUST be US-ASCII with no special
case for clearsigning.  This certainly does violate the nice
UTF8-for-all-text policy of OpenPGP, but we're talking about *armor*
here - the point is to be 7 bit clean.  If we have an 8-bit transport,
why use armor at all?

David

-- 
   David Shaw  |  dshaw(_at_)jabberwocky(_dot_)com  |  WWW 
http://www.jabberwocky.com/
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
   "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX.
      We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>