Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) is a framework for representing tree structured data. It is widely used in communication protocols (e.g., LDAP), security protocols (e.g., X.509), and so on. ASN.1 is designed for efficiency and the data is packed into byte boundaries, and hence is not very readable and is hard to manipulate. Since ASN.1 data is structured data, it should be possible to represent the same information in Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML is not particularly efficient in terms of data length, but is more readable, and it has many off-the-shelf free tools. For such reasons, the translation between ASN.1 and XML will enable us to manipulate efficient ASN.1 data in a user-friendly manner.
We developed a Java library for the translation between ASN.1 and XML, called ASN.1/XML Translator. We also confirmed actual ASN.1 data (e.g., X.509 certificates) were translated into expected XML documents and those documents were translated back into the original data if the data were encoded according to Distinguished Encoding Rules. Moreover we discussed still existing issues and tried to address them, especially support of XML Schema.
By: Takeshi IMAMURA and Hiroshi MARUYAMA
Published in: Symposium on Applications and the Internet(SAINT 2001), US, IEEE, p.57-64 in 2001
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