ASN.1 library for Python

Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) is a technology for exchanging structured data in a universally understood, hardware agnostic way. Many industrial, security and telephony applications heavily rely on ASN.1.

The pyasn1 library implements ASN.1 support in pure-Python.

What is ASN.1

ASN.1 is a large, arguably over-engineered and extremely old data modelling and serialisation tool. It is probably among the first serialisation protocols in the history of computer science and technology.

ASN.1 started its life over 30 years ago as a serialisation mechanism for the first electronic mail (known as X.400). Later on if was split off the e-mail application and become a stand-alone tech still being actively supported by its designers and widely used in industry and technology.

Since then ASN.1 is sort of haunted by its relations with the OSI model – the first, unsuccessful, version of the Internet. You can read many interesting discussions on that topic.

In the following years, generations of software engineers tackled the serialisation problem many times. We can see that in Google’s ProtoBuffers or FlatBuffers, for example. Interestingly, many new takes on binary protocol design do not depart far from ASN.1 from technical perspective. It’s more of a matter of striking a balance between processing overhead, wire format overhead and human readability.

Looking at what ASN.1 has to offer, it has three loosely coupled parts:

  • Data types: the standard introduces a collection of basic data types (integers, bits, strings, arrays and records) that can be used for describing arbitrarily complex, nested data structures.
  • Serialisation protocols: the above data structures could be converted into a series of octets for storage or transmission over the wire as well as recovered back into their structured form. The system is fully agnostic to hardware architectures differences.
  • Schema language: ASN.1 data structures could be described in terms of a schema language for ASN.1 compiler to turn it into platform-specific implementation.

ASN.1 applications

Being an old and generally successful standard, ASN.1 is widely adopted for many uses. To give you an example, these technologies use ASN.1 for their data exchange needs:

  • Signaling standards for the public switched telephone network (SS7 family)
  • Network management standards (SNMP, CMIP)
  • Directory standards (X.500 family, LDAP)
  • Public Key Infrastructure standards (X.509, etc.)
  • PBX control (CSTA)
  • IP-based Videoconferencing (H.323 family)
  • Biometrics (BIP, CBEFF, ACBio)
  • Intelligent transportation (SAE J2735)
  • Cellular telephony (GSM, GPRS/EDGE, UMTS, LTE)

ASN.1 gotchas

Apparently, ASN.1 is hard to implement properly. Quality open-source ASN.1 tools are rare, but ad-hoc implementations are numerous. Judging from the statistics on discovered security vulnerabilities, many people have implemented ASN.1 parsers and oftentimes fell victim to its edge cases.

On the bright side, ASN.1 has been around for a long time, it is well understood and security reviewed.

Download & Install

Changes

All changes and release history is maintained in changelog. There you could also download the latest unreleased pyasn1 tarball containing the latest fixes and improvements.

License

The PyASN1 software is distributed under 2-clause BSD License.

Getting help

Please, file your issues and PRs at GitHub. Alternatively, you could ask for help at Stack Overflow or search pyasn1-users mailing list archive.

Books on ASN.1

The pyasn1 implementation is largely based on reading up the following awesome books:

Here you can get the official standards which is hard to read:

On the other end of the readability spectrum, here is a quick and sweet write up:

If you are working with ASN.1, we’d highly recommend reading a proper book on the subject.