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If the never-ending parade of security vulnerabilities in ASN.1 parsers is any indication, adopting it would certainly provide good exercise in debugging binary formats.

Mark
– Mark

2019-01-16 22:50:29 +00:00
Commented Jan 16, 2019 at 22:50
1

@Mark many small byte arrays (and that in varying hierarchy trees) are often not handled right (securely) in C (for instance not using exceptions). Never underestimate the low-levelness, inherent unsafeness of C. ASN.1 in - for instance - java does not expose this problem. As an ASN.1 grammar directed parsing could be done safely, even C could be done with a small and safe code base. And part of the vulnerabilities are inherent of the binary format itself: one can exploit "legal" constructs of the format's grammar, that have desastrous semantics.

Joop Eggen
– Joop Eggen

2019-01-17 08:09:33 +00:00
Commented Jan 17, 2019 at 8:09

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