[e-lang] Re: Protocol implementation errors

[Ben Laurie]

Peter Gutmann wrote:

> Ben Laurie <ben at algroup.co.uk> writes:
> 
>>Peter Gutmann wrote:
>>
>>>ASN.1 has a *reputation* of being notoriously hard to parse, gained chiefly
>>
>>>from some early bad experiences with OSI work (which would give anything a
>>
>>>reputation of being hard to work with :-).  I've implemented, and I know of
>>>others who have implemented, extremely compact and portable ASN.1 libraries.
>>
>>Do you really mean ASN.1 or do you mean DER/BER?
> 
> 
> Sorry, I meant BER/DER data, not the ASN.1 source text.

In which case, I should comment that most of the bad reputation I'm
aware of has to do with the difficultly of parsing ASN.1 source, and so
people end up implementing the mapping by hand, and so get it wrong.
Which is why X.509 is a nice theory, but don't even think about
unpacking and repacking a cert and having it still work.

Cheers,

Ben.

-- 
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html       http://www.thebunker.net/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff


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