[Cryptography] Is ASN.1 still the thing?

Nico Williams nico at cryptonector.com
Sun Nov 19 20:34:07 EST 2017


On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 01:04:03PM -0800, Ray Dillinger wrote:
> 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.

Did you not read?  The problem is that not all codecs use the same
parsed representation of real numbers.

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

It'd be useless to addressing this problem unless you also had the ITU-T
dictate that only IEEE754 may be used to represent parsed real numbers.

Which in turn would mean no arbitrary precision real numbers, and no
unums, ...

Nico
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