> Hello Experties there, could you pls help me?

What's the question exactly?


> On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Kyle Hamilton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>>Honestly, I'm not sure.  DER says that there is One True Encoding for
>>any given certificate, and I think (but am not sure) that part of it
>>is that "optional" parameters are not an option if the intended values
>>match the defaults.

Nope. DER says nothing about how certificates specifically are encoded. The
DER protocol is at a lower layer.

>>I would guess that one of these is actually in violation of the rules,
>>but I'm not enough of an expert on BER/DER encoding to be able to know
>>for certain.

>>-Kyle H

It's not a violation of DER. The DER protocol has no idea that a missing
version means version 1, nor could it. If the certificate protocol makes a
field optional with a default value, having the field and not having the
field are still different certificates as far as DER is concerned.

If you think about it -- if you convert the certificate into text or XML,
you would still have one certificate with a field present and one with it
absent. On the other hand, if you allowed two different representations for
the number 0, there would be no way to preserve that in another format.

>        I couldn't guess why verison info NULL for some certs?

Someone opted not to put it in, and it is defined as optional. If I had to
guess, I'd say an earlier version of the specification had no version field.
IMO, it would have been smarter to make an omitted version mean version zero
and not have any value for a version that means version zero -- but for some
reason someone decided otherwise.

This means if you express a certificate in any other format, you do have to
distinguish between a certificate that is expressly version zero and one
that does not specify a version.

DS


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