[Cryptography] Encodings for crypto

[Peter Gutmann]

ianG <iang at iang.org> writes:

>There are too many primitives.  I see 11 doing numbers alone!  In practice,
>in network protocols, we do not need bignums, we do not need floats and we do
>not need negatives.  Then, for different sized numbers, we should remember
>that we are about simplification and higher level concepts.  Which should
>tell us we need a number.  

The same can be said of ASN.1.  This currently consists of:

EOC				
BOOLEAN			
INTEGER			
BITSTRING		
OCTETSTRING		
NULLTAG			
OID				
OBJDESCRIPTOR	
EXTERNAL		
REAL			
ENUMERATED		
EMBEDDED_PDV	
UTF8STRING		
SEQUENCE		
SET				
NUMERICSTRING	
PRINTABLESTRING	
T61STRING		
VIDEOTEXSTRING	
IA5STRING		
UTCTIME			
GENERALIZEDTIME	
GRAPHICSTRING	
VISIBLESTRING	
GENERALSTRING	
UNIVERSALSTRING	
BMPSTRING		

Removing the unnecessary stuff, what's left is:

EOC				
BOOLEAN			
INTEGER			

OCTETSTRING		
NULL
OID				



ENUMERATED		

UTF8STRING		
SEQUENCE		







GENERALIZEDTIME	





In everything crypto-related that uses ASN.1, that's what the elements being
used actually are.  Everything else is just unnecessary complexity.

Peter.