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Re: draft-housley-binarytime-00.txt

2004-09-16 13:28:28

Peter:

> >1.1  BinaryTime
> >
> >    Many operating systems represent date and time as an integer.  This
> >    document specifies an ASN.1 type for representing a date and time in
> >    a manner that is compatible with these operating systems.  This
> >    approach has several advantages over the UTCTime and GeneralizedTime
> >    types.
> >
> >Not many systems represent data and time in BER as far as I remember.
>
> I do not understand this comment.  The quoted text says that operating
> systems use an integer, not a character string. BER (or other encoding) is
> going to be applied in either case.  This is essential to resolve endian
> issues at a minimum.

An integer encoded in BER is AFAIK not the way to encode seconds on
on any known system. (I have even forgotten x-endian stuff.).

I am very confused here. Many operating systems use an int32 or an int64 for time values. These are easy to DER encode as an ASN.1 INTEGER.

Russ