Hi!
After getting IDNA (internationalized domain names in applications) out
as RFCs, people are now looking at the local-part of email addresses.
How is the relevant to the OpenPGP spec?
OpenPGP UIDs are essentially free-form, but with the
Name (Comment) <mail(_at_)address>
convention for interop.
The whole string is in utf-8. This opens up two possible ways to encode
a IDN (or an internationalized email address later) in the UID:
1. In ACE form (ASCII compatible encoding)
2. In UTF-8
The ACE form (obtained from the Unicode form by IDNA's ToAscii
transformtion) would look a bit silly given that the slot is
Unicode-aware, but it would work out of the box if you enter it in
encoded form.
The UTF-8 form might or might not work, depending on whether the
software used to create the key would validate the address according to
rfc 2822 or 2821 or simply encode the whole thing in UTF-8.
In any case, I think that rfc 2440bis as an IETF protocol that uses
UTF-8 needs to include at least a stringprep profile to use. I'm no
IETF expert, though, and it may suffice to reuse whatever comes out of
IMAA, but that's still at least half a year away.
If nothing is said and it's accepted as such, then the slot is
automatically an IDNA-unaware one, to be filled with the ACE form.
Some pointers:
3454 Preparation of Internationalized Strings ("stringprep"). P.
Hoffman, M. Blanchet. December 2002. (Format: TXT=138684 bytes)
(Status: PROPOSED STANDARD)
3490 Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). P.
Faltstrom, P. Hoffman, A. Costello. March 2003. (Format: TXT=51943
bytes) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD)
3491 Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names
(IDN). P. Hoffman, M. Blanchet. March 2003. (Format: TXT=10316
bytes)
(Status: PROPOSED STANDARD)
3492 Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized
Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). A. Costello. March 2003.
(Format: TXT=67439 bytes) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD)
And discussions on ietf-imaa(_at_)imc(_dot_)org and
ietf-822(_at_)imc(_dot_)org(_dot_)
Marc
--
It has become fashionable in the post Cold War world to label
opponents as terrorists [...]. By doing so, the authorities instill
within society a culture of fear, leading people to accept that their
rights (and the rights of others) be trampled on for the sake of the
common good. In other words, it justifies the loss of privacy and a
state of surveillance they would otherwise not accept. Both communism
and fascism were examples of this technique used to perfection.
-- John Horvath: The Internet: A Terrorist Network?
Telepolis 2001/08/22 (#9350)
pgpT8XeUTjmYS.pgp
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