Subject: [websec] draft-ietf-websec-strict-transport-sec issue: "directive name" and "directive value"

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2012 16:30:07 -0400

The following came up in my AD review of
draft-ietf-websec-strict-transport-sec, and Jeff suggested that I
needed to take it to the list.  So here it is.

The ABNF in Section 6.1 has this:

   directive = token [ "=" ( token | quoted-string ) ]

Below that, bullet 3 says this:

   3.  Directive names are case-insensitive.

And in Section 6.1.1:

   The syntax of the max-age directive's value (after quoted-string
   unescaping, if necessary) is defined as:

Nothing defines what a directive name or a directive's value is.  You
and I know they're what's on the left side of the equals sign and the
right side, respectively.  We can't assume, though, that people will
figure out that the ABNF definition above turns into "name=value", and
will thus know what those terms mean, completely unambiguously, for
essentially all readers.

Making the grammar like this will fix it:

   directive = directive-name [ "=" directive-value ]
   directive-name = token
   directive-value = token | quoted-string

If there's a good reason not to make the ABNF change above, I'm happy
to accept some other way of defining the terms, but I think they must
be defined.  I think doing it with the ABNF is the easiest and
smoothest way.

Barry

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From: Adam Barth <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2012 13:50:16 -0700

That seems fine to me.

Adam

On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 1:30 PM, Barry Leiba <[email-masked]> wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> websec mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/websec

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From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2012 22:04:07 +0100

Hi Barry,

>   directive-value = token | quoted-string

This looks reasonable to me.