> It's a little bit more than that: cryptographic container formats usually need to be stable on traversal/canonicalized so that things like hashes remain consi

> It's a little bit more than that: cryptographic container formats usually need to be stable on traversal/canonicalized so that things like hashes remain consistent. Yeah, this, too: there's got to be a single way of representing the same message. (BER, in contrast to DER, has multiple means of writing the same message. BOOLEAN types, for example, indicate FALSE by 0x00, but TRUE is any non-zero value. I forget how DER resolves this. DER disallows the use of indefinite lengths, while BER admits both definite and indefinite lengths. Etc., etc.) I'm sympathetic to the challenges people face with ASN.1, having worked with it rather extensively in my career. I don't recommend it to people who have serialization challenges usually because something like protobuf or flatbuffers seems like a more reasonable choice in this day and age...but at the same time ASN.1 has a history of mistakes and innovations for solving some challenging problems in representation and encoding that should inform decision-making moving forward.