[Cryptography] Is ASN.1 still the thing?

Erwann ABALEA erwann at abalea.com
Wed Nov 15 15:45:06 EST 2017


2017-11-15 17:47 GMT+01:00 Nico Williams <nico at cryptonector.com>:

> On Wed, Nov 15, 2017 at 06:11:50PM +1000, James A. Donald wrote:
> > On 11/14/2017 12:30 PM, Nico Williams wrote:
>
[...]

> > I cannot find an open source tool that generates canonical per.
>
> I don't recall whether PER produces canonical encodings.  I imagine it
> could, since it's very similar to XDR as I've explained -- there aren't
> a lot of choices to make, and if there are any, one could standardize a
> variant that leaves no choices (just as DER is such a variant of BER).
>

PER has 2 possible (cumulative) variants: unaligned, and canonical.
There's not that much space left in PER for not being canonical. IIRC, SET
ordering and padding are the only place where there's a difference.
I haven't found a *commercial* compiler that generates the canonical
variant.

It's true that there aren't many (any?) open source implementations of
> PER.  It's a chicken-egg situation: not much uses PER, so not many tools
> support PER.  We should fix this not by creating a replacement for PER
> but by creating the tools as we need them.
>

asn1c (https://github.com/vlm/asn1c) supports PER. It also supports 2008
ASN.1 (while several compilers only support the 1988 dialect).
Unfortunately, the support of information object sets isn't complete, and I
think it doesn't support parameterized types.
But apart from that, it does a good job.

-- 
Erwann.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20171115/217a12af/attachment.html>


More information about the cryptography mailing list