[Cryptography] Is ASN.1 still the thing?

[Jerry Leichter]

> Do JSON, Yaml, or protobuff allow representing data format in ways that give a unique and well defined checksum, that will not be affected by endianess or compiler options?
For protobuf, I'm pretty sure the answer is yes.  It would take a careful reading of the specs to be sure there are no corner cases, and it depends on proper implementation:  protobuf representations of some datatypes are transferred in a compressed format.  For example, integers use a varying-length representation that can drop leading zeroes.  So you *could* represent an integer in multiple ways - though you're *supposed* to use the shortest representation (which is unique).  Whether a receiver would reject a non-canonical representation, I don't know - probably not.

Then again, one could say the same thing about ASN.1.

                                                        -- Jerry