On 10/21/05, Ron Teitelbaum Ron@usmedrec.com wrote:
The ASN.1 is a precursor to x.509v3.
That's not how I remember it. Note: this is all from some serious crypto code hacking in the VW crypto library a few years ago, when I had to make Netscape 4.5 browsers believe that our appserver was a valid SSL server with valid certificates and stuff, with some smartcard authentication threwn in for good measure :)
As far as I remember, x.509v3 is a data structure that uses the ASN.1 for its default external representation.
And ASN.1 is a horrible piece of design-by-committee excrement, apparently extremely hard to write a good clean OO parser for - at least, that's why I think that a loaded VW image typically ends up with 2 or 3 ASN.1 implementations (one for certificates, I think there's another one for SSL handshaking, and I'm getting old but I recall vaguely that I stumbled over a third one). I don't know why but I tried my hands at a parser once, and horribly failed :)