[TSG-Access-RD] For consideration: Proposal to hash PoC in Public Domain Name Whois

[Hollenbeck, Scott]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: TSG-Access-RD <tsg-access-rd-bounces at icann.org> On Behalf Of
> Hollenbeck, Scott via TSG-Access-RD
> Sent: Tuesday, February 5, 2019 2:07 PM
> To: tsg-access-rd at icann.org
> Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [TSG-Access-RD] For consideration: Proposal to hash
> PoC in Public Domain Name Whois
>
> (Trimming recipients)
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: TSG-Access-RD <tsg-access-rd-bounces at icann.org> On Behalf Of
> Ram
> > Mohan
> > Sent: Tuesday, February 5, 2019 1:02 PM
> > To: Adiel Akplogan <adiel.akplogan at icann.org>
> > Cc: MAEMURA Akinori <akinori.maemura at board.icann.org>; tsg-access-
> > rd at icann.org; David Conrad <david.conrad at icann.org>; John Crain
> > <crain at icann.org>
> > Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [TSG-Access-RD] For consideration: Proposal to
> > hash PoC in Public Domain Name Whois
> >
> > Dear Akinori, Adiel,
> > The TSG will consider this proposal and will revert to the BTC on the
> > questions posed below in the next few weeks, certainly prior to the
> > Kobe meeting.
>
> Thanks for passing this on, Ram. At first glance I see potential for conflict with
> RFCs 6350/7095 (vCard/jCard)  and  7483 (RDAP responses). For example, the
> proposal suggests that an email address (which is returned as part of a jCard
> structure by RDAP) could be replaced with a hash value. RFC 6350 says this
> about vCard email address values: "Even though the value is free-form UTF-8
> text, it is likely to be interpreted by a Mail User Agent (MUA) as an "addr-
> spec", as defined in [RFC5322]". So, we don't know how downstream
> consumers (such as vCard parsers) of these hash values will deal with them
> when they're expecting structured email addresses, telephone numbers,
> etc.

I just did some very simple testing to see how some vCard generators and consumers deal with hash values that appear in places where a structured value is expected.

http://bvcard.com/vCard-vcf-generator

This tool complains when it doesn't get a syntactically valid email address. It accepts hash values in places where string values (including telephone numbers) are expected.

http://vcardmaker.com/

This tool happily creates a vCard that include hash values, and Microsoft Outlook imports the created vCard without complaint.

End result: mixed bag with more of a tendency to accept syntactically questionable values without error. More testing would need to be done to ensure that there's no harm in including these values in an RDAP response.

Scott