python3-asn1crypto-1.5.1-1.lbn36.noarch

Python has long had the pyasn1 and pyasn1_modules available for parsing and serializing ASN.1 structures. While the project does include a comprehensive set of tools for parsing and serializing, the performance of the library can be very poor, especially when dealing with bit fields and parsing large structures such as CRLs.

After spending extensive time using pyasn1, the following issues were identified:

Poor performance Verbose, non-pythonic API Out-dated and incomplete definitions in pyasn1-modules No simple way to map data to native Python data structures No mechanism for overridden universal ASN.1 types

The pyasn1 API is largely method driven, and uses extensive configuration objects and lowerCamelCase names. There were no consistent options for converting types of native Python data structures. Since the project supports out-dated versions of Python, many newer language features are unavailable for use.

Time was spent trying to profile issues with the performance, however the architecture made it hard to pin down the primary source of the poor performance. Attempts were made to improve performance by utilizing unreleased patches and delaying parsing using the Any type. Even with such changes, the performance was still unacceptably slow.

Finally, a number of structures in the cryptographic space use universal data types such as BitString and OctetString, but interpret the data as other types. For instance, signatures are really byte strings, but are encoded as BitString. Elliptic curve keys use both BitString and OctetString to represent integers. Parsing these structures as the base universal types and then re-interpreting them wastes computation.

asn1crypto uses the following techniques to improve performance, especially when extracting one or two fields from large, complex structures:

Delayed parsing of byte string values Persistence of original ASN.1 encoded data until a value is changed Lazy loading of child fields Utilization of high-level Python stdlib modules

While there is no extensive performance test suite, the CRLTests.test_parse_crl test case was used to parse a 21MB CRL file on a late 2013 rMBP. asn1crypto parsed the certificate serial numbers in just under 8 seconds. With pyasn1, using definitions from pyasn1-modules, the same parsing took over 4,100 seconds.

For smaller structures the performance difference can range from a few times faster to an order of magnitude or more.