> On 9. Oct 2025, at 19:59, Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> If you are going to replace DER with CBOR, fine. DER is probably the single 
> biggest reason for hatred of ASN.1. The problem being you have to encode 
> nested variants. 

Fine. So no further discussion is needed.

> 
> But that goes away if you are going to take a DER encoded certificate and 
> convert it to CBOR for 'compression'. Once you do that, you have to 
> reconstruct the original DER to validate the signature. And those of us who 
> know DER are saying that is an absolute horror show.
> 
> The only way to efficiently encode DER is to write yourself a custom buffer 
> class that allows you to start at the end of the structure and work 
> backwards. And even then you have to sort sets.  That isn't a problem for 
> most of the TLS world because most certificates come from special snowflakes 
> that have to get themselves $250K audits and such and nobody really checks to 
> see if the certs are really DER in any case.
> 
> If you are trying to use CBOR to compress existing PKIX certs, every relying 
> party is going to have to do the ASN.1 DER encoding rules to validate 
> signatures.

Yes. The relying party needs to understand both C509 and ASN.1 DER encoding 
rules to reconstruct the TBSCertificate for the signature verification. This is 
the cost to have smaller transport size.

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