4 ms·

Can't blame him. ASN.1 is one of the most complicated binary formats, with so many encoding rules that there's no free decoder that can process them all.

by dikei 5y ago

chii 5y ago
Except for interoperability with existing systems, is there any reason why anyone would use this ASN.1 protocol/format? What's it good for?
- IshKebab 5y ago
  No. It mostly exists so that people who haven't tried to use it can tell other people that they should have used ASN.1.
- dikei 5y ago
  In my opinion, avoid ASN.1 if you can. There's a reason why all the cool companies invented their own serialization formats: Google's Protobuf, Facebook's Thrift, etc.. even when ASN.1 had been an international standard for years: It's too complicated.
  - p_l 5y ago
    The big part of the reason is combination of NIH with bad reputation mostly related to X503 and such rather than anything else - hard to advocate for it when the main library you can point to is OpenSSL, and most commonly known encoding is DER (which has certain implementation complexity, effectively being sorted BER, which has certain important value in cryptography). Both Protobuf and Thrift evolved from RPC systems that possibly started out too simple for ASN.1, combined with above issue where good tools were probably commercial and expensive (FWIW, my experience also suggests that Thrift is shitty rpc system, compared even to Sun/ONC RPC, but maybe things changed)
- NavinF 5y ago
  ASN.1 is incredibly good for one use case: As a cautionary tale against design by committee.
mtve 5y ago
BER/DER/PEM encodings are mostly quite simple, have very few subtle details.
- dikei 5y ago
  Yeah, those are the easy one. I worked in Telecom, and dealing with unaligned PER is a PITA.
XAMPPRocky 5y ago
Shameless plug, but you may be interested in my library (which is MIT/Apache-2.0) that offers decoding from BER/DER/CER all from a single model in code, there's no UPER/APER support at the moment, but it's coming in the next few months. :) https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/rasn https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/rasn
cryptonector 5y ago
You mean DER, not ASN.1. ASN.1 is just notation for describing data. There are many encoding rules for ASN.1, including ones based on XML and JSON.

Can't blame him. ASN.1 is one of the most complicated binary formats, with so many encoding rules that there's no free decoder that can process them all.

by dikei 5y ago

Can't blame him. ASN.1 is one of the most complicated binary formats, with so many encoding rules that there's no free decoder that can process them all.

chii 5y ago

Except for interoperability with existing systems, is there any reason why anyone would use this ASN.1 protocol/format? What's it good for?

IshKebab 5y ago
No. It mostly exists so that people who haven't tried to use it can tell other people that they should have used ASN.1.
dikei 5y ago
In my opinion, avoid ASN.1 if you can. There's a reason why all the cool companies invented their own serialization formats: Google's Protobuf, Facebook's Thrift, etc.. even when ASN.1 had been an international standard for years: It's too complicated.
- p_l 5y ago
  The big part of the reason is combination of NIH with bad reputation mostly related to X503 and such rather than anything else - hard to advocate for it when the main library you can point to is OpenSSL, and most commonly known encoding is DER (which has certain implementation complexity, effectively being sorted BER, which has certain important value in cryptography). Both Protobuf and Thrift evolved from RPC systems that possibly started out too simple for ASN.1, combined with above issue where good tools were probably commercial and expensive (FWIW, my experience also suggests that Thrift is shitty rpc system, compared even to Sun/ONC RPC, but maybe things changed)
NavinF 5y ago
ASN.1 is incredibly good for one use case: As a cautionary tale against design by committee.

mtve 5y ago

BER/DER/PEM encodings are mostly quite simple, have very few subtle details.

dikei 5y ago
Yeah, those are the easy one. I worked in Telecom, and dealing with unaligned PER is a PITA.

XAMPPRocky 5y ago

Shameless plug, but you may be interested in my library (which is MIT/Apache-2.0) that offers decoding from BER/DER/CER all from a single model in code, there's no UPER/APER support at the moment, but it's coming in the next few months. :) https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/rasn https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/rasn

cryptonector 5y ago

You mean DER, not ASN.1. ASN.1 is just notation for describing data. There are many encoding rules for ASN.1, including ones based on XML and JSON.