ietf-nntp RFC977bis w.r.t. authentication

[Chris Lewis]

Larry Osterman (Exchange) wrote:
> 
> > > Some text regarding the encoding of the arguments to AUTHINFO GENERIC is
> > > probably appropriate, personally I'd suggest BASE64 encoding (mostly
> because
> > > NNTP is a 7bit protocol and since the SASL packages toss around
> arbitrary
> > > binary data, it makes sense, and partly because that's what the MS
> servers
> > > have done :-)).
> >
> > Is this already covered in other encoding chatter in the spec?
> 
> NNTP is an 8bit protocol in this spec.
> ************
> 
> As I posted earlier, I doubt it's 8bit enough.  Can it handle arbitrary CRLF
> sequences in protocol elements?  Can it handle NULs in protocol elements?

I don't think it matters one whit.  The whole idea of GENERIC/SASL
is to run a secondary non-NNTP protocol, either on the same
connection, or elsewhere.  The NNTP spec doesn't have to say
anything about how the authentication stream is encoded.