On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 1:24 PM, <nalini.elk...@insidethestack.com> wrote: > > >I have been looking for the IANA registry in which the IDNA prefix xn-- > is allocated and have not been able to find it. I can see the following > possibilities > > >1) There isn't such a registry. The allocation is purely ad hoc > > >2) There is a registry but none of the IDNA RFCs bother to list it as a > normative reference. > > >Either one would be bad. The existence or non existence of a registry, > the allocation or non allocation of a code point is not going to cause me > to decide whether or not to use functionality. All that the registry > achieves is to avoid collisions. > > Phil, this is very interesting. > > The 'xn--', of course, is the prefix for punycode used for International > Domain Names. I have seen it used for DNS resolution quite a bit in the > last couple of months. So, it is certainly used. In fact, that appears > to be the only way one can do DNS resolution (at least in my experience). > That is, do the translation from IDN to punycode. Then, it seems to work > like a charm. > > I am not looking to extend the xn-- system, I have another parallel application. Imagine for the sake of argument that someone who was a VIP (VERY VIP) needed a secure email system and imagine that they wanted something that was completely compatible with the existing email infrastructure. A UDF fingerprint MAY be encoded as a DNS label by prefixing the Base32 text representation with the string ‘zz--‘. A DNS name that includes a UDF fingerprint as a DNS label carries the implicit assertion that the interpretation of the address MUST be authorized by a security policy that is validated under a key that matches the corresponding fingerprint. Placing such a DNS label as the top level (rightmost) label in a DNS address creates an address that is not legal and thus cannot be resolved by the Internet DNS infrastructure. Thus ensuring that the address is rejected by applications that are not capable of performing the associated validation steps. For example, Alice has the email security key with fingerprint MB2GK-6DUF5-YGYYL-JNY5E. She uses the following email addresses: * al...@example.com Alice publishes this email address when she does not want the other party to use the secure email system. * al...@zz--mb2gk-6duf5-ygyyl-jny5e.example.com Alice publishes this email address when she wants to give the other party the option of using secure email if their system supports it. The DNS server for example.com has been configured to redirect requests to resolve zz--mb2gk-6duf5-ygyyl-jny5e.example.com to the mail server example.com. * al...@example.com.zz--mb2gk-6duf5-ygyyl-jny5e Alice uses this email address when she wants the other party to be able to send her email if and only if their client supports use of the secure messaging system. While there should never be a DNS label of the form zz--* in the authoritative DNS root, such labels MAY be introduced by a trusted local resolver. This would allow attempts at making an untrusted communication request to be transparently redirected through a locally trusted security enhancing proxy.
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