[ASN.1] ASN.1 Usage In S/MIME

[Phil Smiley]

First, my apologies if this is the wrong forum for this question.  I'm interested  in learning the extent to which S/MIME (and AS2) relies on ASN.1.   My company is evaluating a number of options for deployment of AS2 in our product.  In one of our evaluation meetings, it was said that care must be taken when choosing the correct S/MIME toolkit because of the dependence that S/MIME has on ASN.1 and the complications that introduces.   I can accept that certificates and related cryptographic materials are DER or BER encoded but I would expect that to be done by a cryptographic toolkit from RSA, Baltimore Technologies, Certicom, etc.   I would not expect this to be value added by an S/MIME toolkit.   Beyond the PKCS standards, where does S/MIME utilize ASN.1?   Specific to AS2, are there other parts of that spec that call for ASN.1?   Thank you;  Phil Smiley