decoder memory-management question

[Richard Levitte]

"D. J. Bernstein" <posting-openssl-users at box.cr.yp.to> writes:

> Richard Levitte writes:
>> All things considered, it may be time for us to write some encoder /
>> decoder guidelines...  ossl-guide-encoder(7) and ossl-guide-decoder(7),
>> perhaps?
>
> Sounds useful. I'm curious what I should be doing instead of calling the
> private asn1_d2i_read_bio() function, for example. There are probably a
> bunch of other things that I'm doing suboptimally.

The way we (or at least I) imagined it, most decoders would be made to
decode specific keys, i.e. that our generic DER decoder would be fairly
unusual, because it tries to cover a multitude of ASN.1 structures in
one go.

So for more specific decoders that only care about a specific key type,
we imagined that the ASN.1 structure would be defined by the provider in
question for whatever they need, and a d2i function would be used to try
to decode the blob...  or if the provider authors prefers, a completely
different DER decoder could also be used.  After all, we've tried very
hard not to lock providers to depend on OpenSSL libraries for that sort
of thing.

Cheers,
Richard

-- 
Richard Levitte         levitte at openssl.org
OpenSSL Project         http://www.openssl.org/~levitte/