[Cryptography Team] First Message

[Cees De Groot]

On 10/21/05, Ron Teitelbaum <Ron at 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 :)