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

[James A. Donald]

On 11/16/2017 3:10 AM, Nico Williams wrote:
> Everything we've discussed in this thread, from TLV vs. XDR-like vs.
> textual vs. markup encodings, canonical vs. not, online vs. not,
> extensibility, notation, mapping to/from other schemes (e.g., XML
> Schema) -- it's all there in ASN.1's history, and, indeed, in the
> x.68x and x.69x specification series.  We have decades of experience
> with ASN.1 in the ITU-T and IETF, and in the communities that
> implement protocols that use it.

I could not find a tool that would produce canonical byte aligned PER 
decoding and encoding on both Windows and Linux that did not involve a 
frightening and confusing license.

Let alone manage the sockets and protocol negotiation when forming a 
connection.

> When you reinvent a wheel with this much history, you will almost
> certainly miss important ideas if you don't look at that history.
> 
> And, with this much history, you might as well just _use_ ASN.1 and only
> build new tools as needed.  New encoding rules make sense for interop
> with existing other systems, but that's about it.

I have no plans to reinvent the wheel.  I am looking for a wheel someone 
else has built.  ASN/1 PER was the first thing I looked at. There seem 
to be an absurdly large number of wheels available, but ASN.1 PER is not 
one of them.

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