"David P. Kemp" <dpkemp(_at_)missi(_dot_)ncsc(_dot_)mil> writes:
I've often wondered whether ASN.1 could be used to express the bits on the
wire of an existing protocol such as IPSEC's AH. To do so, one would need
to define "Fixed-field Encoding Rules" (FER) which would place only data
(not tag or length) octets in the datastream, and a set of macros to
conveniently represent the necessary fields.
I dunno about IPSEC, but I'm pretty sure you could shoehorn the SSL encoding
into it without too much trouble, it's just a stripped-down ASN.1+DER (the
best description I can think of is a kiddies ASN.1, without meaning that in a
negative way). I've even seen an attempt at EDI using an ASN.1-like notation,
although the result was... unpleasant (actually I think Colonel Kurtz had
appropriate words for the result).
Peter.