Re: [sidr] RPKI: Are relying parties really supposed to validate DER encoding?

See the Section on DER encoding at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.690.

> On Jan 10, 2019, at 5:26 PM, Alberto Leiva <ydahhrk@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello.
> 
> I have a question:
> 
> RFC 6488 section 3.1.l (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6488#section-3)
> wants relying parties (RPs) to validate that all RPKI signed objects
> are DER-encoded, which (I think) means that they must be BER-encoded
> with minimal and unique representations.
> 
> But I have found at least one other requirement that seems to
> contradict this: RFC 6482 section 3.3, fourth paragraph, second half,
> claims that a ROA (which is a signed object) is allowed to contain
> redundant ROAIPAddress elements.
> 
> Furthermore, RFC 3779 (which is meaningfully referenced by the ROA and
> RPKI certificate (6487) RFCs) states the following:
> 
>   relying parties do
>   not need to sort the information, or to implement extra code in the
>   subset checking algorithms to handle several boundary cases
>   (adjacent, overlapping, or subsumed ranges).
> 
> Which seems to be paraphraseable as "RPs can parse signed objects as
> if they were BER-encoded, without worrying about DER."
> 
> In fact, my reading of it is that the entirety of RFC 3779 seems to be
> of the mind that IP and AS extension writers are intended to strictly
> adhere to DER specifically for the sake of simplifying the task of
> RPs. RFC 6488, on the other hand, wants both to be strict.
> 
> So what's the consensus?
> 
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