[Cryptography] Is ASN.1 still the thing?

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 9:20 AM, David Wong <davidwong.crypto at gmail.com> wrote:
> It depends on your use case, JSON is a textual and ambiguous data
> formatting structure, while ASN.1 with DER is a binary and unambiguous
> data formatting structure. Meaning it is faster and if security relies
> on it you will have "less" troubles.
>
> If you want something fast (binary), but don't want the awfulness of
> ASN.1 I believe google's protobuf is the state of the art solution. Or
> better, you can have a fixed structure (with fixed sized fields) and I
> believe this is what Wireguard does.

I have yet to hear anyone give a good use case for canonicalization.

VeriSign certificates were BER encoded for years until someone finally noticed.