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by mschuster9115 hours ago |
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upvoteby Muromec13 hours ago|
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The trick to asn.1 is to generate both parser and serializer from the spec. Elliptic curve math on the other hand is ... yeah, you need to know the math and also know the tricks to code that implements it. Both of those have steep learning curve, but it's hardly because it's a mess or it's old.
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upvoteby thayne11 hours ago|
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The problem with ASN.1 is that it is big and complicated, and you only need a fraction of it for cryptography, and it isn't really used for anything outside of pki anymore.

It wouldn't be as bad if asn.1 had cought on more as a general purpose serialization format and there were ubiquitous decent libraries for dealing with it. But that didn't happen. Probably partly because there are so many different representations of asn.1.

A bespoke serialization specifically for certificates might actually have aged better, if it was well designed.

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upvoteby jll295 hours ago|
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Assuming there are some libraries for it, would this make a pretty good case for LLM-generated ports of these existing libraries into other languages or onto other OSs/platforms? One implementation could be treated as "the spect".
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upvoteby pocksuppet11 hours ago|
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ASN.1 is protobufs designed by committee. It is a general-purpose serialization format, but there's no good reason to choose it instead of protobufs.
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upvoteby tptacek13 hours ago|
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The trick to ASN.1 is to serialize/unserialize it backwards.
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upvoteby dwattttt12 hours ago|
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#1 NSA, I get it now!
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upvoteby mschuster9113 hours ago|
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> Both of those have steep learning curve, but it's hardly because it's a mess or it's old.

Bitpacking structures used to be important in the 60s. That time has passed, unless you're dealing with LoRa, NFC or other cases of highly constrained bandwidth there are way better options to serialize and deserialize information. It's time to move on, and the complexity of all the legacy garbage in crypto has been the case of many a security vulnerability in the past.

As for the code, it might be personal preference but I'd love to have at least some comments referring back to a specification or original research paper in the code.

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upvoteby Muromec13 hours ago|
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I think you misunderstand the problem asn.1 solves and constrains it works within (both 30 years ago and now). We sure can have a better one now once we learned all the lessons and know what good parts to keep, but this critique of bitpacking is misplaced.
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upvoteby Avamander13 hours ago|
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ASN.1 is not used because of just bitpacking. There are other benefits to ASN.1 and it's probably one of the least problematic parts there.

People who have thought they can do better have made things like PGP. It's one of the worst cryptographic solutions out there. You're free to try as well though.

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upvoteby Muromec13 hours ago|
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People who though they can do better did JWT, that is not complicated at all and has no bugs as well. Also solves 20% of what asn.1 is used for.
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upvoteby thayne11 hours ago|
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Maybe a bit pedantic, but it would actually be the more general JOSE which includes tokens (JWT), signatures (JWS), and key transmission (JWK).

And there is a related binary format that uses CBOR (COSE) as well.

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upvoteby tptacek14 hours ago|
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The typical vector for entering cryptography as a professional is called "grad school".
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upvoteby cyberax14 hours ago|
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X.509 is a deep legacy, but at least at this point it's well tested.

> because that's the only thing Java speaks

No, it most definitely is not. You can just construct a private key directly in BouncyCastle: https://downloads.bouncycastle.org/java/docs/bcprov-jdk18on-...

I'm 100% certain that you also can do that with raw java.security. I did that about 15 years ago with raw RSA/EC keys. You can just directly specify the private exponent for RSA (as a bigint!) or the curve point for EC.

Ditto for ed25519, you can just take the canonical implementation from DJB. And you really really shouldn't do that anyway, please just use OpenSSL or another similar major crypto library.

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upvoteby Muromec13 hours ago|
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I wouldn't recommend touching openssl (the library, command line tools are okay-ish) with anything that breaths life.
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upvoteby mschuster9113 hours ago|
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> I'm 100% certain that you also can do that with raw java.security.

I tried that, the problem is Meshcore specific - they do their own weird shit with private and public keys [1]. Haven't figured out how to do the private key import either, because in the C source code (or in python re-implementations) Meshcore just calls directly into the raw ed25519 library to do their custom math... it's a mess.

[1] https://jacksbrain.com/2026/01/a-hitchhiker-s-guide-to-meshc...

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upvoteby cyberax11 hours ago|
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I'm playing with LORA/Meshcore right now (I have an nRF52840 lying around). I'm pretty sure I know how to do that, will take a look.
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