Subject: draft-aboba-radext-wlan-09 (fwd)

From: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:10:04 -0800

Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:46:02 +0100 (MEZ)
From: Alfred HÃ¶nes <[email-masked]>
To:  <[email-masked]>,  <[email-masked]>,  <[email-masked]>,  <[email-masked]>
Cc:  <[email-masked]>
Subject: draft-aboba-radext-wlan-09

Hello,
I started to review the I-D authored by you,
        draft-aboba-radext-wlan-09,
but after stumbling over a rather general issue,
I stopped delving into other details.

This issue is a systematical violation of the RADIUS spec
and draft-ietf-radext-option-design-05:

As pointed out in Section 2.1.1 (et al.) of the latter,

   [RFC2865] defines the following data types:

|  text           1-253 octets containing UTF-8 encoded 10646 [RFC3629]
|                 characters.  Text of length zero (0) MUST NOT be sent;
|                 omit the entire attribute instead.
|  string         1-253 octets containing binary data (values 0 through
|                 255 decimal, inclusive).  Strings of length zero (0)
|                 MUST NOT be sent; omit the entire attribute instead.
   [...]

In persistent violation of these principles,
draft-aboba-radext-wlan-09 calls for zero-length String values
in many attributes, starting with Section 2.2:

   Length

|     >=2

   String

      [...]                                           As a result, an
|     EAP-Key-Name Attribute sent in an Access-Request MUST NOT contain
|     any data.  [...]

There's many more similar and closely related text in the draft
for other attributes.

IMO, this draft should be reworked to follow the existing specs and
the guidelines, and not request sending Null-String values attributes.

Another general recommendation:

In order to reduce the probability for clerical errors to happen
during the final processing after IANA assignments, I strongly
recommend using distinguished placeholders for the code points to
be assigned by IANA, e.g.,  "TBA1", "TBA2", ... or  "TBD1", ...
(This is aligned with recommendations in BCP 26, RFC 5226.)

Kind regards,
  Alfred HÃ¶nes.

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