RE: Certificate = DER ?

> I think that every ASN.1 parser that I've ever used (or written) will
accept
> BER-encoded data transparently to the invoking application, so I don't
think
> that encountering a BER-encoded certificate is a big deal in practice.

I'm not convinced that it's true, but I could be convinced. And again, the
issue is not ASN.1 parsing, it's certificate parsing. People don't use
general ASN.1 code to load certificates. They use code that uses ASN.1 code
internally.

(I do believe, upon looking closer, that OpenSSL claims to handle BER in its
DER-oriented certificate functions, which would be consistent with this
claim.)

But what about non-BER/DER encodings?

Regardless of the outcome of the discussion, it's my strong opinion that
V2.0 of this schema needs to fix this. If we want to support multiple
encodings, that's fine by me, but not signaling the encoding in the XML is
pushing the burden for interop on other specs.

-- Scott

Received on Friday, 7 November 2008 19:40:35 UTC