Re: Bug in RFC 2459

[pgut001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Peter Gutmann)]

>Looks like draft-ietf-pkix-ipki-part1-11.txt specifies DisplayText for the 
>organization, so it must have been changed sometime before that.
 
It looks like it appeared in draft 08, June 1998.
 
>In anycase, we will update the extension to conform with the RFC.
 
This may not help much, since it'll just break any existing implementation 
which expects an IA5String (in practice I suspect it won't make any 
difference, because almost everything seems to ignore the policy stuff, but 
it's still a bit risky).  The problem lies with the RFC and not with existing 
implementations, what you'd need to do is allow a changeover period as with 
dates and UTF8String's where you can use IA5String until (say) 2005, but after 
that should use DisplayString.
 
Currently I'm using a CHOICE { DisplayString, IA5String } with DisplayString 
first in the encoding table which means it'll be generated in preference to 
IA5String, but IA5String will still be accepted when decoding certs.
 
Peter.