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International username, password, and nickname handling with PRECIS Framework

Summary

PRECIS, "Preparation, Enforcement, and Comparison of Internationalized Strings", is a framework for handling Unicode strings representing things like network addresses, identifiers and passwords, and nicknames.

In PRECIS terms, a client (e.g. web browser) prepares a string (e.g. username, password) before sending it over the network. A server (e.g. a PHP web app) enforces specific rules (e.g. checking for disallowed characters, case mapping, etc.) on the string before accepting and using it. Enforcement involves an accept/reject decision and may involve changing the string using a PRECIS profile-specific kind of normalization. When comparing two strings, both are enforced before comparion. If a hash function is used in the comparison (e.g. for a password), enforcement comes before hashing and comparison.

The PRECIS RFCs standardize such preparation and enforcement (obsoleting older standards) and this package provides a PHP implementation.

Functionality

The Precis class provides static methods to:

• test strings against the strings classes defined in PRECIS Framework RFC 8264

  • IdentifierClass
  • FreeformClass
• prepare and enforce strings according to the profiles
  • UsernameCaseMapped RFC 8265 Section 3.3
  • UsernameCasePreserved RFC 8265 Section 3.4
  • OpaqueString (used for passwords etc.) RFC 8265 Section 4.2
  • Nickname RFC 8266

In order to implement these, certain Unicode functionality is required that was absent in PHP before PHP 7.0 introduced IntlChar. The package has another class as a stop-gap.

• Bidi provides static methods for:

  • Getting the Unicode Bidi property for a character
  • Applying the IDNA Bidi Rule

(Note: The CaseFold class in v0.1.1 of this package was removed after PRECIS removed it in revised RFCs.)

Methods

All public methods are static.

This package also has some general Unicode utilities that were required before PHP 7 introduced the IntlChar class. These remain as we maintain PHP 5.4 compat for now. And we contunue to use mbstring for the Unicode toLowerCase() operation.

Data

The Bidi class has its own "data trait" that contains the relevant data from the Unicode Character Database. They are PHP classes in order to exploit opcode caches. They are traits not because I plan to reuse them elsewhere but for convenience. First, because they are automatically generated from the UCD and, second, because it's easier to work on the corresponding methods without the big array literals in the same editor.

The generators for the data traits are in the data directory. They download the relevant UCD files and write the PHP trait classes to standard output. So you can regenerate them, for example, as follows (assuming php is in your path):

cd path/to/precis/project/dir
php data/generateBidi.php > BidiDataTrait.php
php data/generateCaseFold.php > CaseFoldDataTrait.php

Unit tests

The Precis tests are incomplete because I could not find test vectors for PRECIS string classes or profiles or for the Bidi Rule.

The following are relatively well tested:

• UTF-8 utility functions are tested on every Unicode code point
• Bidi::getClass(). NOTE: this test downloads UnicideData.txt from UCD (1.5 MB)
• The CONTEXTO and CONTEXTJ rules
• Precis::getPrecisProperty()

The DerivedPropertyValueTest uses the table of derived property values from IANA that's stuck on Unicode 6.3.0. Hence we ignore tests where the IANA table says UNASSIGNED and Precis says something else.

Copyright and license

• Copyright (c) 2015-2018 Spinitron LLC
• ISC license https://opensource.org/licenses/ISC