eap Mailing List: RE: Re: Issue 281: Backward compatibility problem

[Bernard Aboba (aboba]

> Section 2.1 says:
> "
>    Some existing systems are known to use EAP-Request/Identity messages
>    to send proprietary information to the peer.  This proprietary
>    information is considered to be part of the displayable-string in the
>    ABNF shown above.  In other words, the NUL character followed by the
>    NAIRealms list MUST be placed at the end.
> "
>
> Please note the last sentence.  This means that the client can always
> start at the end of the string and extract realms until it encounters a
> "\0NAIRealms=".  Does this make sense?  Or am I missing your point here?
> BR,
> Farid

I think you're proposing that a NULL be used as a separator.  Given
current practice, I'm not sure why this is necessary.  Is there a reason
why an implementation couldn't just parse the data after a NULL and look
for "NAIRealms=" and then check whether the previous character was a NULL
or a comma?  This seems simple enough, and it would be interoperable with
existing implementations.