Re: Edited Edupage, 24 March 1996

[Simon Spero <ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu>]

On Thu, 28 Mar 1996, Eric Young wrote:

> On Wed, 27 Mar 1996, Phil Karlton wrote:
> > My apologies for misunderstanding what you wrote. It could be that I am
> > oversensitive on the issue since SSL has been "accused" of being
> > proprietary in many forums.

A lot of the aura of "proprietariness" of SSL comes from the early 
history, which I don't think we need to go into again.

> ASN.1 BOOLEAN type, and I have only just been able to get hold of the 
> actual full specification of X509v3.  The UNIVERSALSTRING type?  Only 
> found out about it's existance 3 days ago.

DER BOOLEAN :  [UNIVERSAL 1]
	
	true - 0x01 0x01 0xff
	false- 0x01 0x01 0x00

I never had any problem getting hold of ASN.1 information for free (I 
even managed to get a change into the PER spec without being a government).
Marshall Rose's "The Open Book" really helped.  protectzia rules, even if 
Tim doesn't know what it means :)

Mind you, when I was working on z39.50 I had tremendous fun working on 
debugging when just about everybody had hand-rolled their own compilers 
or codecs, and nobody actually had a real copy of the ASN.1 specs 

The real problem with asn.1 is that it is so easily abused; unless you 
stop and think about what the spec you're writing is going to look like 
in terms of structs and bits on the wire it's way too easy to come up 
with something completely unimplementable. 

When used correctly it can be a life saver, and when used with PER, the
encodings generated are often way better than you'ld end up with if you
designed the encodings manually, especially for modern cache
architectures; however if the spec is fucked up there's not a lot you can 
do. 


Hmm - hi abuse potential - now there's something that really needs federal
regulation. 

Simon