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Re: [TLS] TLS grammar checker?

"Salz, Rich" <rsalz@akamai.com> Wed, 19 June 2013 11:49 UTC

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From: "Salz, Rich" <rsalz@akamai.com>
To: "tls@ietf.org" <tls@ietf.org>
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 07:49:36 -0400
Thread-Topic: [TLS] TLS grammar checker?
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Subject: Re: [TLS] TLS grammar checker?
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To quell some other commentary, I wasn't talking about creating any kind of automatic code generation. Yesterday afternoon I wrote a yacc/lex (er, Bison/flex) parser that seems to get the syntax right. It doesn't do any semantic checking (e.g., duplicate choices in an enumeration). Not sure if I'll go any further with it, so if you want it drop me a line.

I think there is a great benefit to using a standard language. The knee-jerk "no" to my ASN.1 suggestion doesn't surprise me. XSD is another possibility, but that seems too ... weird .. for me. Many other IETF security standards use ASN1, the documentation is freely available, it is widely known and understood, and some tools are available. If I get some free time later in the summer I might experiment with it.

	/r$

--  
Principal Security Engineer
Akamai Technology
Cambridge, MA

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