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

[Nico Williams]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2017 at 10:32:15PM +0100, Erwann ABALEA wrote:
> 2017-11-15 22:03 GMT+01:00 Nico Williams <nico at cryptonector.com>:
> > The IETF participants who complained were right, and the ITU-T was right
> > to respond by adding PER.  (Which goes to show that the ASN.1 community
> > was and probably still is responsive.)
> 
> It still is, as OER is pretty recent, and JSER should be finalized shortly.

Excellent!  OER looks pretty good; I hope it always encodes lengths in
fixed sizes so that it can be online for encoding.  I'm pretty sure that
in the face of extensions, any PER-like encoding cannot be online for
encoding, since lengths become necessary, unless extensions get chunked
(which I forget if PER does).

Is JSER JSON Encoding Rules?  The only things I can find on that call it
JER.

> ASN.1 is far from being dead :)

Indeed.  The haters gonna hate, but they don't have a leg to stand on.

Honestly, I don't really like the use of tagging in ASN.1 modules as
it's just a distraction and people do sometimes make mistakes in their
choices of tags, and the syntax is a bit clunky, especially for the IOS.
But other than that I can't think of a legitimate complaint about ASN.1,
not even lack of tooling, since anything new one constructs instead of
ASN.1 will always also lack tooling initially.  The only way in which
[lack of] tooling makes a difference is for existing alternatives to
ASN.1.

Nico
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