Re: [Rfid] Re: XML vs. Text vs. Binary

It is probably important to point out on this thread as well that
security and human readability are mutually exclusive, and security
needs will trump human readability (including binary decodes through
open source, free tools such as Ethereal) any day.   So designing for
human readability in what is inherently machine-to-machine operation
does not seem like a requirement, especially if RFID deployments grow
the way we all believe they will.

Scott

On Fri, 2005-07-22 at 07:33, Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 06:56:14AM -0400, Scott Barvick wrote:
> > Stephane,
> >  
> > From the security perspective, the protocol processing is layered on 
> > top of standard security mechanisms as discussed in Section 4.2 of 
> > the draft.  Therefore, the implementation can safely access fields 
> > in payload as efficiently as possible.
> 
> I will leave it to implementors to decide whether they want to be 
> robust against broken implementations or not. However, I like to point 
> out two things:
> 
> a) As long as security processing is done in software, this will weight
>    more than any encoding/decoding required, whether that is a binary
>    format or not does not matter.
> 
> b) Our SNMP experience is that encoding/decoding is not at all an
>    issue when it comes to the amount of CPU cycles burned. Most of 
>    the time is spend accessing the instrumentation and in the security 
>    processing (if enabled). So if you want to optimize CPU usage, 
>    make sure you look at the whole system and spend the efforts
>    where you can maximize the benefit.
> 
> Human readability is a major enabling factor. In theory, all you need 
> is a decent library to handle binary encodings well but in the real 
> world it seems to help if people can do things without relying on 
> such a library. Human readable encodings (and I include XML here) 
> simply enable more people to get into the "game" and this is 
> ultimately driving the success of a technology.
> 
> /js

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