Re: WG Last Call: draft-ietf-sasl-gs2-02.txt

[Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams@xxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Sep 04, 2006 at 04:37:26PM +0100, Alexey Melnikov wrote:
> Simon Josefsson wrote:
> 
> >A maxbuf value of 0 has weird semantics -- it is a error-state, and
> >authentication using a maxbuf=0 value with security layers should not
> >succeed.
> > 
> >
> Yes. (So is maxbuf=1)

Good point!  So is maxbuf == 2, or any impractically small value.

Is this an error state for the framework or for the application?  I say
the latter.

> >It seems simpler to use it to signal something else (i.e., no buffer
> >size limit) than to use 0xFFFFFF for the same thing on the wire AND
> >ALSO describe the behaviour for the error state.
> > 
> >
> I would like to have consistency accross multiple SASL mechanisms. GS1 
> or DIGEST-MD5 don't treat 0 specially.

Me too.

> If you insist on using 0 in way different from GS1 and DIGEST-MD5, 
> please stick a big note saying that GS2 is different from GS1 in 
> handling of maxbuf==0.

I don't think GS2 should treat maxbuf==0 differently than other SASL
mechanisms unless those other mechanisms' treatment of it is itself
broken.

Nico
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