30 Jan
2021
30 Jan
'21
7:50 a.m.
On 29/01/2021 17:02, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Mon, 25 Jan 2021, John Cowan wrote:
BER does not work for digital signatures (because encodings are not
unique), hence DER.
N.
I've been messing around with X.680, aka
ASN/1. Its reputation for
horrible evilness, I find, primarily comes from the Packed Encoding
Rules and the interface with statically typed languages, both of
which require dealing with the schema language programmatically. But
if you want to drive it from a dynamically typed language, it's dirt
simple: to write, see what data type you have, output a type and
length and value (or type and value and terminator), and there you are.
I was never quite sure what to make of ASN.1 and BER; it seemed to
solve the problem of OpenLDAP applications talking to each other (and
I got quite good at reading wire traces), but it somehow seemed wrong
when every box was running FreeBSD on Intel/AMD.
-- Dave