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Comments on SPKI draft of 25 March 1997


I think we have five kinds of names for principals:
	
	<key>		a public key
	<hash>		a hash of a public key
	<simple-name>	a <key-or-key-hash> followed by a single byte string
	<general-name>  a <key-or-key-hash> followed by a sequence of byte 
				strings
	<relative-name> a sequence of byte strings (assume a <key> of the 
                        issuer)

The proposal has the following syntax:
	( public-key ... )
	( hash ... )
	--no specific syntax--
	( fully-qualified-name ...)
	( ref ...)

I suggest that the BNF have the five types as above, but that the actual
syntax use the same object type for the last three, as SDSI does:
	( ref <key-or-key-hash> name ) 			for <simple-name>
	( ref <key-or-key-hash> name1 name2 ... ) 	for <fq-name>
	( ref name1 name2 ... )				for <relative-name>
and that the implementation check for the appropriate number and type of
arguments (e.g. that there is a real key-or-key-hash when necessary, etc.)

Also: shouldn't the names allowed be general byte-strings and not just tokens?
What if a Chinese user wants to give appropriate names to the public keys
of his colleagues?  Shouldn't he be able to used unicode, e.g.
	[unicode] chinese-name
(or, following my previous note)
	( display-type unicode chinese-name )
instead of just tokens?

Ron Rivest
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