I've been thinking about a good way to explain this for a couple of days I think the best way is convert the ASN.1 to some psuedo-typed-JSON. For an X.509v3 pu

I've been thinking about a good way to explain this for a couple of days I think the best way is convert the ASN.1 to some psuedo-typed-JSON. For an X.509v3 public key, the ASN.1 would look like this in JSON-with-types: [ [ [type:<oid>]: "1.2.840.113549.1.1.1", [type:<null>] ], [type:<bitstring>]: <encoded>[ [type:<bigint>]: 39054839120582390568029762340674230..., [type:<bigint>]: 65537 ] ] "<encoded>" here means an ASN.1 value is serialized and then contained as a binary string. As you can see here, you only know the structure and type. This falls apart here at the "bitstring" value -- it's an opaque binary blob, which happens to be ASN.1 again, which you would only know if you know the schema. If we converted this to something more self-describing it would look more like (borrowed kind of from TJSON): { "publicKeyInfo:<o<oid,...>>": { "publicKeyType:<oid>": "1.2.840.113549.1.1.1", "publicKeyParams:<null>": null }, "publicKey:<o>": { "n:<bigint>": "39054839120582390568029762340674230...", "e:<bigint>": "65537" } } Having this kind of human description in addition to the type and structure makes it easier to work with if you don't know what's inside the structures.