Re: Efficiency of libtasn1?

[Rick van Rein]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your addition!

> If in doubt, as Nikos said, benchmark your process.
> What I did for this quick shot is
>
> valgrind --tool=callgrind gnutls-cli www.amazon.de >/dev/null
> valgrind --tool=callgrind openssl s_client -connect www.amazon.de:443
>
> and displaying the results with kcachegrind.
>
I am not aiming for TLS, but for much simpler things, such as LDAP,
possibly for internal use (keyserver, contact server).  I am aware that
there are only large-scale solutions for LDAP and I would like to come
to something much more modest ("LilyDAP" might be a name) and perhaps
pluggable, akin to web servers.

On the development side I was looking for an embedded style for the low
end ("run your identity provider on
yet-another-simple-device-of-the-day), desiring the smallest possible
code and storage; I also believe that the same techniques can greatly
leverage large-scale roll-out on the high end.

I have been twisting my head around the question if it would be possible
to modify just the internals of libtasn1, while retaining the API, but I
failed; I kept coming around to "this requires some static form of
walk-through description".  I started prototyping tha idea and created a
"Quick DER" parser that is much closer to these wishes.  (I also
discussed the need for an open source toolkit with this style of
programming with crypto-domain peers, who agreed it would be very useful
to have.)

I didn't report it here because I thought it might not be considered
pleasant to hear that someone went another way.  But if you are
interested, you are of course welcome to take a look at this totally
different approach,

http://github.com/vanrein/quick-der

This is pretty much what I had in mind when I was looking for an ASN.1 /
DER parser -- very tiny, very efficient and it can even work without
allocating memory anywhere but on the stack.  Of course I am widely open
to feedback and critism of any kind (though this list may not be the
right forum for it).


Thanks,
 -Rick