ietf-nntp RFC977bis w.r.t. authentication

[Larry Osterman (Exchange)]

If the authentication protocol runs over the NNTP connection, then it's
encoding MUST be specified as a part of the NNTP protocol.  The encoding of
ALL data transmitted on the NNTP port must be specified.  Otherwise we get a
non-interoperable mess.

Larry Osterman
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-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Lewis [mailto:Chris.Lewis.clewis at nt.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 1998 9:54 AM
To: ietf-nntp at academ.com
Subject: Re: ietf-nntp RFC977bis w.r.t. authentication


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.