Shibboleth, Tomcat, AJP and UTF-8 conversion

[Cantor, Scott]

> Sadly, as the RFC doesn't lock it down, the encoding depends on the
> implementation used.
> So to be safe, you have assume the worst - which is ISO-8859-1 (at
> least according to the Tomcat people).

My recollection was that people are generally discouraged from using non-ASCII data in headers, but what complicates this is that we're not just talking headers. Use of server variables is really internal to Apache and then passed along via AJP and there's not much to guide that.

The SP doesn't have a lot of good choices apart from just base64-ing everything, which isn't an option people like, but it is something I allowed some wiggle room on by creating a mechanism to at least identify other encodings of the attributes in the future.

-- Scott