4 ms·

This year's ASN.1 BER. Again

jnwatson 6y ago
Speaking of which, I’ve never seen a marshaling protocol with as sophisticated a message versioning scheme as ASN.1. The amount of thought that went into specifying how to allow “implementations from the future” to interoperate with those of the past is impressive.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  And yet outclassed on any meaningful metric by generic serialization languages? ASN.1 is a programming language in addition to a data transport format opening up many opportunities for security vulnerabilities. Performance is shit because it’s using text to encode everything so that it’s human readable. Similarly parsing is extra complicated and slow for that reason. Serialization/deserialization requires a dedicated library rather than one that can be reused across all tasks. Finally the data representation itself is extremely bloated vs the binary data. It’s impressive in the same way that cassette technology and the neat things people did with them. I really wish some reasonable IDL would just get adopted for standards purposes rather than each standard developing their own. All other serialization formats using an IDL seem strictly better.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    > Performance is shit because it’s using text to encode everything so that it’s human readable. Similarly parsing is extra complicated and slow for that reason. [...] Finally the data representation itself is extremely bloated vs the binary data. A weird criticism considering the encoding rules usually used for ASN.1 are all binary and some of them are bit-packed (like PER), which is very uncommon in newer protocols (for good reason). Oh and there is OER now, which is actually a very reasonable binary encoding.
  - lttlrck 6y ago
    Are you confusing ASN.1 "the language" with the encoding rules that are driven by it?
- tonyg 6y ago
  Isn't it amazing? ASN.1 seems like such a low bar to pass, and yet.
athrowaway3z 6y ago
I've never done a proper read up on ASN.1 to know when and if to apply it. But i think its biggest obstacle apart from a flashy website is its wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1). It is just overloaded with concepts that don't seem to be solving my problem, and its not clear what is a must-know and what is not.
brabel 6y ago
I wrote an ASN.1 parser once (the platform we were using didn't have one)... and been wondering exactly why there are so many new binary formats when it all goes down to something just like ASN.1 :D, mostly (which is what, 30 years old now?).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

Speaking of which, I’ve never seen a marshaling protocol with as sophisticated a message versioning scheme as ASN.1. The amount of thought that went into specifying how to allow “implementations from the future” to interoperate with those of the past is impressive.

vlovich123 6y ago
And yet outclassed on any meaningful metric by generic serialization languages? ASN.1 is a programming language in addition to a data transport format opening up many opportunities for security vulnerabilities. Performance is shit because it’s using text to encode everything so that it’s human readable. Similarly parsing is extra complicated and slow for that reason. Serialization/deserialization requires a dedicated library rather than one that can be reused across all tasks. Finally the data representation itself is extremely bloated vs the binary data. It’s impressive in the same way that cassette technology and the neat things people did with them. I really wish some reasonable IDL would just get adopted for standards purposes rather than each standard developing their own. All other serialization formats using an IDL seem strictly better.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  > Performance is shit because it’s using text to encode everything so that it’s human readable. Similarly parsing is extra complicated and slow for that reason. [...] Finally the data representation itself is extremely bloated vs the binary data. A weird criticism considering the encoding rules usually used for ASN.1 are all binary and some of them are bit-packed (like PER), which is very uncommon in newer protocols (for good reason). Oh and there is OER now, which is actually a very reasonable binary encoding.
- lttlrck 6y ago
  Are you confusing ASN.1 "the language" with the encoding rules that are driven by it?
tonyg 6y ago
Isn't it amazing? ASN.1 seems like such a low bar to pass, and yet.

athrowaway3z 6y ago

I've never done a proper read up on ASN.1 to know when and if to apply it. But i think its biggest obstacle apart from a flashy website is its wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1). It is just overloaded with concepts that don't seem to be solving my problem, and its not clear what is a must-know and what is not.

brabel 6y ago

I wrote an ASN.1 parser once (the platform we were using didn't have one)... and been wondering exactly why there are so many new binary formats when it all goes down to something just like ASN.1 :D, mostly (which is what, 30 years old now?).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]