Kerberos v5's experience with ASN.1

[Theodore Ts'o]

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   To: Cypherpunks Lite <cp-lite at comsec.com>
   Date: Sat, 2 Sep 1995 13:55:38 -0400
   From: jis at mit.edu (Jeffrey I. Schiller)

   However, the problem with ASN.1 isn't its waste of space (which actually
   isn't that bad for a mechanism for encoding arbitrary objects). 

While I won't argue about the rest of Jeff's note about the use of ASN.1
being a mistake, I do want to point out that certain ASN.1 types are in
fact very wasteful of space.

Most notable of these is the ASN.1 Generalized Time --- which encodes
the a timestamp in ASCII.  ASN.1 GeneralizedTime therefore requires 17
bytes to encode, an over four-fold increase in the amount of space
needed to store a time, compared with a 4 byte representation of "number
of seconds since 1970".  This is deadly in a protocol which has to store
lots of timestamps, which is the case in Kerberos V5.

We could have gotten around this problem by merely storing an integer
whenever we needed to store a timestamp, instead of using the ASN.1
abstract type.  Then it would have only taken 6 bytes (ASN.1 adds a
2-byte overhead for each object which you store).

					- Ted

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