From: Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@...>
Date: 2006-07-08T03:54:50+09:00
Subject: Re: ASN.1 for Ruby

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The SSL/TLS wire protocol is a binary format, but it's not based on ASN.1.
You may be thinking of the X.509 and PKCS standards, which are full of
ASN.1stuff (and of course they're implemented in the crypto libraries
that come
with OpenSSL). For all those applications, I'd say the less the users know
about the data-representation, the better.

I was wondering about plain old ASN.1 with BER/DER/CER as a transport
protocol. My guess is that it's not very interesting these days.

On 7/7/06, Andrew Hodgkinson <ahodgkin@rowing.org.uk> wrote:
>
> Francis Cianfrocca wrote:
>
> > Is anyone actually interested in ASN.1 support for Ruby? I implemented
> > enough of it for LDAP in the Net::LDAP library, in a reasonably
> > encapsulated way so it could be abstracted into its own package. I'd
> > be happy to do this if anyone has a use for it.
>
> OpenSSL comes with an awful lot of ASN.1 code, though I don't know how
> extensive this is compared to your requirements or your implementation.
> Extracting the ASN.1 part of your LDAP library sounds reasonable.
> However, would it be worth instead (or also) extending the Ruby
> interface to OpenSSL to expose its ASN.1 features?
>
> Sadly documentation on both sides of the fence is pretty poor which
> might not help. Ruby OpenSSL doesn't have much at all; as a starting
> point see:
>
>   http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/openssl/
>
> That said there are people using it. It seems to give straightforward
> code from the little bits that I've seen used so far, such as here:
>
>
> http://technoweenie.stikipad.com/plugins/show/Reversible+Encrypted+Passwords
>
> Although a lot of the crypto library is now documented, the OpenSSL
> project hasn't described the ASN.1 API yet:
>
>   http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/crypto.html
>
> The distribution does come with a few relevant .pod files that don't
> seem to be online but they only cover a tiny fraction of the interface
> visible in <crypto/asn1/asn1.h>. Meanwhile, Google returns nothing but
> security advisories for "openssl 'asn.1'"... Is it me, or have I just
> spent the last few minutes arguing against myself? :-)
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
>

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