HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 08 Apr 2002 22:32:22 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) Last-Modified: Tue, 21 May 1996 22:00:00 GMT ETag: "2e7cf1-d11-31a23ce0" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 3345 Connection: close Content-Type: text/plain Mark Andrews INTERNET DRAFT CSIRO Expires: September 1996 May 1996 Updates RFC-1035 ASCII Encoding for Domain Names draft-andrews-dns-ascii-01.txt 1. Status of This Memo This document is an Internet Draft. Internet Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its Areas, and its Working Groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet Drafts. Internet Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months. Internet Drafts may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is not appropriate to use Internet Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as a "working draft" or "work in progress." Please check the 1id-abstracts.txt listing contained in the internet- drafts Shadow Directories to learn the current status of any Internet Draft. 2. Abstract [RFC 1035 Section 5.1] describes how to encode domain names as character strings. It however allows non printable characters to be used. It also allows for encodings of text files which would not survive intact ftp ASCII mode transfers, different end of line conventions. This document addresses these problems by stating where octal escapes MUST be used. While a applications MUST continue to read the full range as expressed by [RFC 1035 5.1]. They MUST emit only this selected subset. 3. Encoding Octets within the follow ranges are encoded as backslash followed by three octal digits, 0x00 - 0x20, 0x7f - 0xff. e.g. 0x00, \000 0x1f, \177 0xff, \377 Andrews [Page 1] Internet Draft draft-andrews-dns-ascii-01.txt May 1996 Period (".") when NOT used as a domain separator is encoded as the sequence backslash period, e.g. "\.". Un-escaped periods indicate label separators. Backslash ("\") is encoded as two consecutive backslashes, e.g. "\\". Double quotes ('"') should always be represented as backslash quote as a common nameserver implementation mis-parses strings containing quotes, e.g. '\"'. Semi-colon (";") should always be encoded as backslash semi-colon otherwise it will be interpreted as a comment. e.g. "\;". Space may be a literal space when the string is enclosed by double quotes. All other characters represent their literal ASCII encoding eighth bit not set. 4. Security This draft introduces no known security problems. It may however remove some latent security problems in applications where the encoding is NOT reversible leading to unexpected changes in domain names. 4. References [RFC-1035] P. Mockapetris, ``DOMAIN NAMES - IMPLEMENTATION AND SPECIFICATION'', RFC-1035, ISI, November 1987. 6. Author's Address Mark Andrews CSIRO Division of Mathematics and Statistics Locked Bag 17 North Ryde NSW 2113 AUSTRALIA Mark.Andrews@dms.csiro.au [MA88] Andrews [Page 2]