[VOIPSEC] 4G Issue Map: signaling complexity

[Craig Southeren]

On Fri, 25 Aug 2006 02:56:30 -0400
"Hadriel Kaplan" <HKaplan at acmepacket.com> wrote:

..deleted

> No, I don't mean Ethereal doesn't literally parse the PER (although that has
> happened, it's rare).  I mean the vendor specific extension, or a new
> protocol extension.  When ASN encoding adds one it's a binary blob.  A
> well-defined blob, but a blob nonetheless to me.  When ABNF adds one it is
> human readable, usually.  Typically I can pick out what its subfields are
> and maybe even discern simple semantics from it.  For example I can see if
> they stuck URIs somewhere inside their "blob", or whatever.  Interestingly,
> I can also do a google search and usually find that proprietary field or
> header somewhere.  In fact, one can learn about new (or expired) drafts one
> wasn't paying attention to this way. :)  Or I can figure out if they used an
> old encoding syntax that was in an early draft that got changed later. 
> 
>  
> > It's true that not having the "magic decoder ring" (i.e. the ASN.1
> > description) for a H.323 extension makes these difficult to
> > reverse-engineer, but that is no worse than putting binary into the
> > Content-Body of a SIP PDU, or having opaque hex fields in MIME headers.
>  
> Of course.  But it's also rare to see such in SIP headers.  Bodies, well...
> I'm not supposed to care about bodies.  ;)

Then I guess we *do* live in different worlds :)

   Craig

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 Craig Southeren          Post Increment – VoIP Consulting and Software
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