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Re: encoding: SPKI vs. SDSI
>
> However, I believe it is vitally important, not just for certificates as a
> cause, but also for any IETF effort, that what we come up with is friendly
> to the lone developer in his garage and not something where a large
> corporation with a large budget has too much advantage. Therefore, I would
> argue strongly against any encoding (like BER/DER) which calls for a support
> library or compiler or both.
>
> My friends in the smart card business also argue against those libraries,
> but on different grounds.
>
> - Carl
I am a lone developer working in my basement with just a C compiler and
libc.so. X.509 certificates and DER encodings work just fine in that
environment. Having an automated ASN.1 tool might be nice, just as
having lex and yacc/bison is nice in an ASCII parsing environment, but
it's not a requirement.
Using automated tools is just a tradeoff between programmer efficiency
and code efficiency. Using the C compiler is a worthwhile tradeoff
for me (the last assembly language I programmed in was the 6502 :-).
But assembler might be necessary for smart card implementations, for
either DER or parenthesized lists.