KerberosTime

[Gustavo V. G. C. Rios]

Thanks a lot for your clarifications!

Sam Hartman wrote:
> 
> In your quest to understand KerberosTime, you seem to be missing the
> critical factor in standardization decisions.  The important thing in
> most cases is to have a decision made and to agree to that decisions.
> Representations of data don't matter all that much; we'd be OK with
> integer time, we seem to be OK with KerberosTime.
> 
> we're certainly better off having all the Kerberos implementations and
> specifications use a single format for time.  We're certainly better
> off keeping things that way rather than paying the cost to change our
> time representation.
> 
> When decisions are made, factors like representation size,
> implementation complexity and handling corner cases like time beyond
> the year 2038 are worth discussing.  When we are aware of these
> factors, we try to account for them.  But once the decision is made,
> the reasoning is often no longer important.  It might have been an
> arbitrary decision made by someone who didn't really thing things
> through and needed some way to represent time.  It might have been
> something the working group spent hours arguing over.  But the
> decision will remain because we wish to continue being interoperable
> and the cost of change is too high.
> 
> Sometimes we need to pay the price of change; if we had used integer
> time, we would need to make sure eventually that all the
> implementations could deal with integers longer than 32-bits.  We're
> having a long drawn-out discussion of how to handle making Kerberos
> extensible withing the Kerberos working group.  We believe it has
> finally gotten to a point where we need to pay that price.
> 
> But questioning decisions of the early Kerberos ASN.1 rarely leads to
> enlightenment.  RFc 1510 does not use ASN.1 particularly well.  Many
> of the decisions in RFC 1510 are fairly arbitrary.  Feel free to ask
> the questions; you may find out something new or draw our attention to
> some problem.  Just don't be surprised to learn that an arbitrary
> decision was made years ago and no one knows why or questioned the
> decision.
> 
> --Sam