Re: [Acme] ACME or EST?

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2014 at 5:42 PM, Christian Huitema
<[e-mail]> wrote:
>> One of the many reasons to drop ASN.1, particularly the Deranged Encoding Rules.
>>
>> The type of coding error that comes up is as follows:
>>
>> Tag Length[ Tag Length [Value]]
>>
>> Lets say each atom has a length of 1 byte, this would be coded
>>
>> xx 03 xx 01 xx
>>
>> Now what happens if the coder is wrong and instead gives:
>>
>> xx 99 xx 01 xx
>>
>> Buffer overrun error time!
>
> On the other hand, there is enough information in the BER/DER encoding to perform run time verifications and avoid these overruns. It falls in the general category of "never trust input received from the network."

But as a programer responsible for the security of the code, that
means I can't just take an off the shelf ASN.1 library and use it. I
have to roll my own to be sure the checks are made. Which in fact is
what I do.

So the existence of ASN.1 tools does nothing to reduce the impact of
the needless complexity.


> I am not sure that the message description language matters very much, the quality of the implementation matters much more. And, as far as protocol go, better keep the syntax as simple as possible. But you are right about the level of "exotic complexity" in ASN.1. It does not help.


That is why I would like us to stick to one data model and at most two
encodings of that data model going forward. Those being text and
binary.