[Cryptography] [FORGED] Re: Is ASN.1 still the thing?

[alex at alten.org]

Quoting Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>:
>
> If you really want something simple, lightweight, and straightforward, what
> about XDR?  That's pretty well defined, and dates from a time when primary
> design goals were that stuff be efficient and easily implementable, rather
> than as complex as you can make it, or as hip as possible, or with angle
> brackets (some stuff encompasses all three of those).
>

God, I hated ASN.1. I spent the better part of six years dealing with  
ASN.1 in SNMP (at first in raw binary/hex), then an uncounted number  
of years dealing with it in X.509 and PKCS. DER, BER, ugh!!

I actually built a couple of custom authentication protocols using XDR  
~20 years ago when I was doing heavy amounts of C, C++ and Intel  
assembly.  I really liked XDR.  Nice and simple. Perfect for small  
authentication payloads (about 300 bytes back then).

- Alex