OSI-X400ops Working Group E. Stefferud INTERNET DRAFT: A=IMX Network Management Associates, Inc. draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt October 1993 C=US; A=IMX (Expires: January 26 1993) Status Of this Memo This document provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Abstract This document establishes an Internet Based X.400 Administrative Management Domain (ADMD) with the name "A=IMX", for use in the United States of America (C=US), according to the applicable rules of CCITT Recommendations and ISO Standards, and in keeping with existing regulatory practices in the United States of America. It also establishes a naming authority under the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to register and openly publish Private Management Domain (PRMD) names subordinate to A=IMX under C=US. The name "IMX is registered with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) MHS Management Domain (MHSMD) register as is appropriate for names that are to be used as ADMD names in the United States of America (c=US). Any chosen C=US ADMD name is a matter of arbitrary choice as long as it does not conflict with any other choice of ADMD name by any other ADMD Service Provider operating in association with C=US. Registration of IMX as the ADMD name for the Internet in C=US will serve to avoid any possible name collision, and will enable Internet PRMD operators to obtain and register PRMD names for use with X.400. NOTE: Other countries may or may not take similar actions, at their sovereign discretion. How C=US and other Internet based ADMD operations in other countries should or should not be coordinated is not addressed in this document. 1. Introduction X.400 is the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT) identifier for Message Handling System (MHS) Recommendations [X.400]. The ISO/IEC identifier for the matching ISO/IEC Standard is IS-10021 [10021]. CCITT was recently renamed to be the International Telecommunications Union - Telecommunication (ITU-T). Many organizations in the Internet community wish to deploy X.400 for the purpose of exchanging Electronic Mail messages. Working within X.400 specifications, this document establishes and names the required C=US Internet ADMD to meet X.400 infrastructure needs. Stefferud draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt [Page 1] INTERNET DRAFT: A=IMX draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt October 1993 The X.400 Recommendations call for a specific naming and addressing infrastructure consisting of Administrative Management Domain (ADMD) entities within each sovereign Country (C), where each ADMD must have an unambiguous name within its given country and where each ADMD then becomes a naming authority for the registration of unambiguous names of subordinate Private Management Domain (PRMD) entities. In combination, the set of domain attributes, with their associated name values, constitute tagged attribute=value pairs which can be used to form ORAddresses (e.g., C=US; A=IMX; P=SOME-NAME; O=COMPANY; OU=Sales) [X.411, Figure 2, Part 30 of 41]. This document, is only concerned with ADMD and PRMD levels. All levels below PRMD are a local matter within each PRMD. 2. X.400 Requirements on ADMD and PRMD Names ADMD and PRMD Name values are limited by the X.400 Recommendations to a maximum length of 16 PrintableString characters [X.411, Figure B-1 (Part 2 of 3)]. Case, multiple white space characters, and leading or trailing white spaces are all non-distinguishing for purposes of matching [F.401, Section 5.3]. The PrintableString character set is essentially US-ASCII without: @ atsign ! exclamation point (bang) % percent sign _ underscore " double quote Specifically, PrintableString is a subset of International Alphabet Number 5 (IA5), shown in this table copied from [X.208, Table 5]. ______________________________ Name Graphic ______________________________ Capital letters A,B,...Z Small letters a,b,...z Digits 0,1,...9 Space (space) Apostrophe ' Left parentheses ( Right parentheses ) Plus sign + Comma , Hyphen - Full stop . Solidus / Colon : Equal sign = Question mark ? ______________________________ Source: CCITT X.208, Table 5 Stefferud draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt [Page 2] INTERNET DRAFT: A=IMX draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt October 1993 3. Relationship to Domain Name System (DNS) The X.400 naming scheme has certain similarities to the Internet Domain Naming System (DNS) [DNS], which is also global and hierarchical with distribution of naming authority to entities at each subordinate level in the naming tree. Many thousands of names have already been registered in the DNS. The DNS coincidentally uses the same international register of country codes (ISO 3166 two-character codes) for its top level names (e.g,. US and GB), except that the DNS also includes UK for interesting historical reasons, and includes some three character top level domain names. Currently, these are COM, EDU, GOV, INT, MIL, NET, and ORG. It is known that additional two character country codes will be added to ISO 3166 and to the DNS. It is not known whether or not additional three character top level names will be added to the DNS. It is not known whether new top level names of greater than 3 characters may be added to the DNS. DNS names are limited to 64 characters of US-ASCII letters (A-Z), digits (0-9), hyphen (-) and dot (.), with dot restricted to use as a constructive delimiter between concatenated names from ascending DNS levels. Case is non-distinguishing for purposes of matching. Embedded white space is not allowed. Leading and trailing white space is ignored for purposes of matching. 4. Name of the C=US Internet ADMD The name of the C=US Internet ADMD is "IMX". 5. PRMD Names in C=US; A=IMX PRMD Name Registration is accomplished by overt application to the IANA registration agent by the registrant. A registration form will be supplied by the IANA registration agent. All IANA registered PRMD names will be openly published by the IANA for public access. To align with CCITT X.402 and ISO/IEC 10021-2, the IANA registrar shall not register the name values of "single-space" [X.402, Section 18.3.1] or a single zero (0). [CCITT-MHS, Section 3.2.3] These special names are reserved in X.400 for special purposes. All IANA registered PRMD names are assumed to be the rightful intellectual property of the registration applicant, but may be subject to legal challenge of the applicant's right to use the name at any time. The IANA takes no position with regard to the legal "right to use" of any registered name, and leaves resolution of any challenge to the challenge parties, which may or may not involve litigation. In the event of challenge to any registered PRMD name, the IANA only records in its register the result of whatever resolution may occur, upon notification of the resolution by the registrant or by some other authority with proper jurisdiction. Stefferud draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt [Page 3] INTERNET DRAFT: A=IMX draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt October 1993 6. Sources of PRMD Registered Names PRMD names registered by the IANA under A=IMX are drawn from: (1) DNS names already registered in the DNS naming tree, which do not exceed the X.400 limit of 16 characters, or (2) any other name that is guaranteed not to conflict with any other IANA registered PRMD name under C=US; A=IMX, or any current or possible future DNS name. Examples of (1) are: P=nma.com; P=uci.edu; P=nic.ddn.mil; P=nsf.gov; P=sintef.no NOTE: P=cnri.reston.va.us contains 17 characters and thus is not permitted by X.400 to be used as a PRMD name. This may be unfortunate for CNRI, but the cause of the problem is in the X.400 limit of 16 PrintableString Characters, not the DNS. NOTE: There is no reason to disallow C=US; A=IMX; P=sintef.no if sintef.no wishes to so register. Thus it is not proscribed. The key requirement is that a PRMD name must be an unambiguous string of permitted characters uniquely registered to a single owner under the registering ADMD, so any existing DNS name with 16 or fewer characters under any DNS top level domain may be used as a PRMD name in C=US; A=IMX because all such DNS names are already unambiguous and uniquely assigned to registrants by the IANA in the Internet DNS, and they only contain allowed characters. This is a secondary use of a DNS name. If a name is ever removed from the DNS for any reason, then it must also be removed from the IANA PRMD name register, if it is so registered. DNS names are not automatically registered as PRMD names. Examples of (2) are: P=ESnet; P=NASA; P=Boeing Seattle; P=XYZZY; P=CALTRANS All such names must not conflict with any possible current or future DNS name that may or may not ever be registered. 7. Proscribed PRMD Names The following PRMD Names are proscribed, in accordance with the rules given in Section 6 above: (1) Any PRMD name that is also registered in the DNS, unless it is registered in the DNS by the same registration applicant. Stefferud draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt [Page 4] Internet Draft: A=IMX draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt October 1993 (2) Any PRMD name that ends in a dot (.) followed by any number of characters of the kind allowed in DNS top-level domain names, unless also registered in the DNS by the same registration applicant. 8. Operation Of C=US; A=IMX Operating rules for elements of the X.400 Mail Transfer System (MTS) in the Internet are not addressed in this document. The rules for interconnection of A=IMX PRMDS with other ADMDS are not addressed in this document. 9. Security Considerations This document does not address any aspect of security. It neither exacerbates nor reduces any security problems or risks that are already inherent in X.400 technologies or deployed systems. 10. References [X.208] CCITT Recommendation X.208, 1988, Specification of Abstract Syntax Notation - One (ASN.1) [X.400] CCITT Recommendation X.400, 1988, Message Handling System and Service Overview. [10021] ISO/IEC 10021-1, 1988, Information Processing Systems -- Text Communication -- MOTIS -- System and Service Overview. [F.401] CCITT Recommendation F.400, 1988, Naming and Addressing for Public Message Handling Services. [X.402] CCITT Recommendation X.402, 1988, Message Handling Systems: Overall Architecture. ISO/IEC 10021-2, 1988, Information Processing Systems -- Text Communication -- MOTIS -- Overall Architecture. [X.411] CCITT Recommendation X.411, 1988, Message Handling Systems: Message Transfer System: Abstract Service Definition and Procedures. ISO/IEC 10021-4, 1988, Information Processing Systems -- Text Communication -- MOTIS -- Message Transfer System: Abstract Service Definition and Procedures. Stefferud draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt [Page 5] INTERNET DRAFT: A=IMX draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt October 1993 [MHS] CCITT MHS, March 1992, Implementors' Guide, Version 8 [1988] [ASCII] Coded Character Set--7-Bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange, ANSI X3.4-1986. [DNS] Paul V. Mockapetris. Domain Names -- Concepts and Facilities. Request for Comments 1034, DDN Network Information Center, SRI International, November 1987. 11. Author's Address Einar A. Stefferud Telephone: +1 714 842 3711 Network Management Associates, Inc. Facsimile: +1 714 848 2091 10301 Drey Lane Internet: Stef@nma.com Huntington Beach, CA 92647-5615, USA Stefferud draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt [Page 6] INTERNET DRAFT: A=IMX draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt October 1993 Appendix: Discussion of ADMD name value chosen for C=US portion of the global Internet NOTE: If and when this RFC is published as an Informational or Experimental RFC, this Appendix may be removed The name value of "A=IMX" has been arbitrarily chosen because it is short and suggests the idea of mail exchange, but it is not an acronym for any specific set of words. It is just an easily remembered, easily typed set of characters without any assigned meaning. It is required to obtain consensus for this choice of name from the IETF, the IAB, and the Internet Society and then the right to legal use of the name must be established in the United States of America. Choosing a name for something like an ADMD is a political issue, and requires consideration of the rights of others to use the chosen name. In the Internet, it is not yet clear who should act to secure legal rights to the use of a selected name. This document has been developed to lay the technical groundwork without getting caught up on the political/legal/administrative issues of name establishment. With adoption of this document as the working basis for C=US ADMD and PRMD name registration, we should next be able to progress on to legal action to secure the right to use the chosen name. In order to progress with this work, the University of Wisconsin, supported with NSF Grant Funds, has taken the action to register A=IMX in the ANSI MHSMD register as appropriate for any C=US entity wishing to establish an operational ADMD which can then register subordinate PRMD names. The University of Wisconsin will hold the registration for the benefit of the C=US Internet Community, with the understanding that the registration will be transferred to another appropriate holder if and when one arises. is not available for Internet ADMD Name use in C=US, in that it is reserved by the [CCITT X.400 | ISO MOTIS] [Recommendations | Standards] for the name of a virtual ADMD that is to be approved by some National Body in C=US. This issue is of no concern to the IETF, IAB, or ISOC as long as we do not attempt to use the proscribed name. We should not seek approval of any C=US National Body in the establishment of an Internet ADMD in C=US. No other C=US ADMD has sought nor obtained any such approval, and thus the precedent has been set for the C=US Internet community to self assert ADMD status. Stefferud draft-ietf-x400ops-admd-03.txt [Page 7]