Encoding of AlgorithmIdentifier with NULL parameters

[Blumenthal, Uri - 0553 - MITLL]

“OPTIONAL” means the parser must deal with complete absence, not only encoded as ASN.1 NULL.

 

Broken parsers should be fixed.

--

Regards,

Uri

 

There are two ways to design a system. One is to make is so simple there are obviously no deficiencies.

The other is to make it so complex there are no obvious deficiencies.

                                                                                                                                     -  C. A. R. Hoare

 

 

From: openssl-users-bounce <openssl-users-bounces at openssl.org> on behalf of openssl-users <openssl-users at openssl.org>
Organization: WiseMo A/S
Reply-To: Jakob Bohm <jb-openssl at wisemo.com>
Date: Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 21:10
To: openssl-users <openssl-users at openssl.org>
Subject: Re: Encoding of AlgorithmIdentifier with NULL parameters

 

Also note that the official ASN.1 declaration for 
AlgorithmIdentifier (from X.509 (2012), section 7.2) marks 
the parameters field as OPTIONAL, so parsers really should 
accept its absence.

However if broken parsers are common (this thread 
only found one such parser), maybe it would be 
good practice to include the NULL value for compatibility.

AlgorithmIdentifier{ALGORITHM:SupportedAlgorithms} ::= SEQUENCE {
    algorithm ALGORITHM.&id({SupportedAlgorithms}),
    parameters ALGORITHM.&Type({SupportedAlgorithms}{@algorithm}) OPTIONAL,
... }

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