Re:So you want to serialize some DER?
by ggm on Monday June 30, 2025 @11:51PM
(#44430421)
So many encoding rules. DER, PER. It's an xkcd cartoon but inside one asn.1 standard!
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it's as much one standard as OIDC is ;)
(as in it isn't one standard but a group of standards, like asn.1 without any encoding is split in ~4 standards by itself. Through to be fair all or CER, BER and DER are in the same standard. But PER is another standard, so is XER, OER, JER, GSER, RXER each and others.)
The standard is 41 years old, so there has been plenty of time for extensions.
Practically, the useful encodings are DER, which is canonical and used for crypto, and XER, which is human-readable.
It is a neat spec, chock-full of great ideas. Unfortunately, given its age, there have been many bad implementations of it.