[3726] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Wassenaar vs. CipherSaber
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (EKR)
Sat Dec 5 23:21:45 1998
To: Raph Levien <raph@acm.org>
Cc: Steve Bellovin <smb@research.att.com>, jim@acm.org, cryptography@c2.net
From: EKR <ekr@rtfm.com>
Date: 05 Dec 1998 11:36:35 -0800
In-Reply-To: Raph Levien's message of "Fri, 04 Dec 1998 17:41:27 -0800"
Raph Levien <raph@acm.org> writes:
> 2. Use the simplest possible binary data formats. PGP has lots of "hand
> Huffman coding", and the ASN1-based formats are about as bad. Go, 32-bit
> bigendian integers, go!
If your intention is to simplify the codecs, why would you want to use
binary at all? It's nearly always easier to parse text strings than it
is to parse binary encodings, and they have the advantage of being
much more extensible. If you use binary formats, you must either use a
self-describing format such as ASN.1 or you need to have a good idea
of what options you're going to allow ahead of time.
Speaking as someone who's done implementations of PEM, MOSS, and
PKCS-7, I'd rather hand-code an ASCII codec than a PKCS-7 codec any
day. (Note that working with an ASN.1 compiler is a different story
entirely).
-Ekr
--
[Eric Rescorla ekr@rtfm.com]
