Appendix A. ASN.1 and Distinguished Names
Abstract
The OSI Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) and X.500 Distinguished Names play an important role in the security standards that define X.509 certificates and LDAP directories.
A.1. ASN.1
Overview
The Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) was defined by the OSI standards body in the early 1980s to provide a way of defining data types and structures that are independent of any particular machine hardware or programming language. In many ways, ASN.1 can be considered a forerunner of modern interface definition languages, such as the OMG's IDL and WSDL, which are concerned with defining platform-independent data types.
ASN.1 is important, because it is widely used in the definition of standards (for example, SNMP, X.509, and LDAP). In particular, ASN.1 is ubiquitous in the field of security standards. The formal definitions of X.509 certificates and distinguished names are described using ASN.1 syntax. You do not require detailed knowledge of ASN.1 syntax to use these security standards, but you need to be aware that ASN.1 is used for the basic definitions of most security-related data types.
BER
The OSI's Basic Encoding Rules (BER) define how to translate an ASN.1 data type into a sequence of octets (binary representation). The role played by BER with respect to ASN.1 is, therefore, similar to the role played by GIOP with respect to the OMG IDL.
DER
The OSI's Distinguished Encoding Rules (DER) are a specialization of the BER. The DER consists of the BER plus some additional rules to ensure that the encoding is unique (BER encodings are not).
References
You can read more about ASN.1 in the following standards documents:
- ASN.1 is defined in X.208.
- BER is defined in X.209.
