Inconsistent handling of signatures, keys, etc.

[samuelwilliams]

The handling of cryptographic keys, signatures and other data that is ultimately represented as Base16, 32, or 64 encoded string is inconsistent across all Rdata type classes. These should be handled the same.

Signatures et al inputted into Rdata classes SHOULD be setted and getted in raw binary form; the only time it is outputted to a text encoding is when $rdata->toText() is called.

This would be a backward-compatibility breaking change, so will not be implemented until v4.0

These are the classes that are affected:

• KEY
  • DNSKEY
    • CDNSKEY
• DS
  • CDS
  • DLV
  • TA
• CERT
• DHCID
• HIP
• IPSECKEY
• NSEC3
• RRSIG
  • SIG
• SSHFP
• TKEY
• TLSA
• TSIG

The future code should look like:

$rdata = new TYPE1234();
$rdata->setPublicKey(10100011110000111010101110001001...);
$rdata->getPublicKey(); // Returns 10100011110000111010101110001001...
echo $rdata->toText(); // Echos o8OriQ...

The downside of this would be that you would need to be careful to decode already Base64 encoded strings.