[Cryptography] Is ASN.1 still the thing?

Ray Dillinger bear at sonic.net
Sat Nov 18 16:04:03 EST 2017



On 11/17/2017 12:36 PM, Watson Ladd wrote:



>> The moment you parse into an IEEE754 representation and use that as the
>> canonical form for subsequent output, you've failed to round-trip.

 ~clip~

> If your serialization doesn't know about floats, it won't work with
> floats. If your source and destination are using different
> representations why on earth would you expect that to work?


Why, indeed, should anyone be using a serialized representation of
IEEE754 floats that doesn't roundtrip?  You can express them in hex with
a hex point if you like (some) human readability, but the serialization
is now exact and specifies an unambiguous meaning.

Of course, nobody can propose that to the ASN.1 standardization
committee now, and if one could they'd probably have rejected it.

				Bear


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