reports/rfc/draft-andrews-dns-ascii-01.txt

   1                                                             Mark Andrews
   2 INTERNET DRAFT                                                     CSIRO
   3 Expires: September 1996                                         May 1996
   4 Updates RFC-1035
   5
   6                     ASCII Encoding for Domain Names
   7
   8                      draft-andrews-dns-ascii-01.txt
   9
  10 1. Status of This Memo
  11
  12    This document is an Internet Draft.  Internet Drafts are working
  13    documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its Areas,
  14    and its Working Groups.  Note that other groups may also distribute
  15    working documents as Internet Drafts.
  16
  17    Internet Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
  18    months.  Internet Drafts may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by
  19    other documents at any time.  It is not appropriate to use Internet
  20    Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as a "working
  21    draft" or "work in progress."
  22
  23    Please check the 1id-abstracts.txt listing contained in the internet-
  24    drafts Shadow Directories to learn the current status of any Internet
  25    Draft.
  26
  27 2. Abstract
  28
  29    [RFC 1035 Section 5.1] describes how to encode domain names as
  30    character strings. It however allows non printable characters to be
  31    used. It also allows for encodings of text files which would not
  32    survive intact ftp ASCII mode transfers, different end of line
  33    conventions. This document addresses these problems by stating where
  34    octal escapes MUST be used.
  35
  36    While a applications MUST continue to read the full range as
  37    expressed by [RFC 1035 5.1]. They MUST emit only this selected
  38    subset.
  39
  40 3. Encoding
  41
  42    Octets within the follow ranges are encoded as backslash followed by
  43    three octal digits, 0x00 - 0x20, 0x7f - 0xff.
  44
  45            e.g.
  46                    0x00, \000
  47                    0x1f, \177
  48                    0xff, \377
  49
  50
  51
  52 Andrews                                                         [Page 1]
  53 \f
  54 Internet Draft       draft-andrews-dns-ascii-01.txt             May 1996
  55
  56
  57    Period (".") when NOT used as a domain separator is encoded as the
  58    sequence backslash period, e.g. "\.". Un-escaped periods indicate
  59    label separators.
  60
  61    Backslash ("\") is encoded as two consecutive backslashes, e.g. "\\".
  62
  63    Double quotes ('"') should always be represented as backslash quote
  64    as a common nameserver implementation mis-parses strings containing
  65    quotes, e.g. '\"'.
  66
  67    Semi-colon (";") should always be encoded as backslash semi-colon
  68    otherwise it will be interpreted as a comment. e.g. "\;".
  69
  70    Space may be a literal space when the string is enclosed by double
  71    quotes.
  72
  73    All other characters represent their literal ASCII encoding eighth
  74    bit not set.
  75
  76 4. Security
  77
  78    This draft introduces no known security problems. It may however
  79    remove some latent security problems in applications where the
  80    encoding is NOT reversible leading to unexpected changes in domain
  81    names.
  82
  83 4. References
  84
  85    [RFC-1035]
  86       P. Mockapetris, ``DOMAIN NAMES - IMPLEMENTATION AND
  87       SPECIFICATION'', RFC-1035, ISI, November 1987.
  88
  89 6. Author's Address
  90
  91    Mark Andrews
  92    CSIRO
  93    Division of Mathematics and Statistics
  94    Locked Bag 17
  95    North Ryde NSW 2113
  96    AUSTRALIA
  97
  98    Mark.Andrews@dms.csiro.au [MA88]
  99
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 108 Andrews                                                         [Page 2]
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