Principal naming

Shawn M Emery Shawn.Emery at Sun.COM
Sat Apr 11 02:17:37 EDT 2009


Recently there has been some ambiguity on how to handle case sensitivity 
for principal names.  Various principal name components are used either 
in upper or lower case.  For example the following principal names are 
considered valid:

HTTP/host1.example.com at EXAMPLE.COM
HOST/host1.example.com at EXAMPLE.COM
host/host1.example.com at EXAMPLE.COM
host/HOST1.EXAMPLE.COM at EXAMPLE.COM

In order to prevent issues with interoperability, I believe that it 
should be made clear what we can inference from a principal name and 
that the various implementations reflect this.

The other question/issue is that there is no formal syntax to represent 
valid principal names.  Currently there are a number of questionable 
principal names that can added to the database.  For example:

host/@EXAMPLE.COM
host/@
/@
//@
user@

Some principal names can not be used with Kerberos utilities, others may 
be able to by accident.  My opinion is that a formal syntax for 
principals names should exist, but should also allow for future 
extensions.  The syntax can be used to enforce which principal names are 
allowed to be populated in the database and therefore supported by the 
various utilities.

Shawn.
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