At 19:03 -0700 8/23/03, Karl Auerbach wrote:
On Sat, 23 Aug 2003, Dean Anderson wrote:
H.323 and ASN.1 eventually surpass ...
Ummm, based on my own direct experience with ASN.1 since the mid 1980's
(X.400, SNMP, CMIP...), I disagree.
It has been my experience that ASN.1, no matter which encoding rules are
used, has proven to be a failure and lingering interoperability and
denial-of-service disaster.
For example, the flaws in ASN.1 parsers in SNMP engines have proven to be
a decades+ old vulnerability for the net.
To be fair, the flaws were in an implementation that one person
developed and many used. The same sort of problem with a
vulnerability being widespread has occurred in other contexts, w/o
regard to the encoding scheme. So, this really is a red herring in
this argument.
We'd be much better off with XML, Scheme expressions, or Python pickles
than with ASN.1 both for expressing data structures in documents and for
encoding data structures into binary for carriage in packets.
Certainly XML is not going to yield a smaller encoding, so your
reasons for preferring it have to be based on value judgements in
other dimensions.
steve