Re: [pkix] Signature Verification and DER requirements

[Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>]

On 15/05/15 15:12, Erik Andersen wrote:
> I am interested in comments.

Loooong ago there used be a few circumstances in which people
unwisely BER encoded certificates. The only one I can recall
that approached not being plain silly was X.400 security where
there might be giant ASN.1 things to send around that required
indefinite length encoding. Streaming video was I think the
example people used to justify that, not that I recall anyone
actually sending secure X.400 mails like that.

In such a case your code might be presented with a BER encoding
of a certificate (in the envelope) and have to reconstruct the
DER encoding. I'd say it was a dumb idea even then but I think
we ran into it. IIRC most other cases were really bugs, where
people used the wrong inputs to ASN.1 encoders because they
didn't know better or were lazy.

I would guess/hope all such code is long gone now though.

S.