[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Fwd: [e-lang] Protocol implementation errors
frank@t... (Frank) writes: >If a spec is hard to implement, surely it's hard to implement securely. >Certainly that applies if it's hard to understand. > >If it is hard to implement, what is gained by the tradeoff? I'm not entirely sure that "ASN.1 is hard to implement" as a general thing. I haven't tried doing it myself, but it does seem like a fairly straightforward process in the research I've done. The problem isn't necessarily that the spec is impossible or that only geniuses can keep up with BER/PER/etc. The problem - coming from an XML perspective - is that ASN.1 comes from a very different cultural background and a different set of assumptions about how best to process data. In my explorations, ASN.1 toolkits felts more to me like data-binding kits than XML parsers. There doesn't seem to be much notion of anything like an "ASN.1 infoset", a set of containers and properties you can explore without necessarily knowing the bindings. ASN.1 feels effectively schema-driven, designed from the outset to be optimized for a world where processes are tightly bound. There aren't general ASN.1 "parsers" in the same sense that there are XML parsers, or at least there weren't last time I looked. Folks who actually care about XML per se are often looking for looser bindings. ASN.1 chafes against the kinds of assumptions that are common in XML, like that I might conceivably work on found documents with no accompanying metadata. ASN.1 is not for me, for all of those reasons. At the same time, however, I think ASN.1 makes sense for a lot of applications where XML is currently in vogue, because it was built from the outset with data-binding priorities and benefits in mind. (I don't think ASN.1 likely has worse security than XML, either.)
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