[ldapext] X.509, RFC4523, RFC3641, big Ints

[Howard Chu <hyc@highlandsun.com>]

Something that we've recently encountered while testing our Certificate 
validation rules is certificates whose serial numbers are integers whose 
values are larger than 4 octets. I'm wondering how other folks deal with these 
things. Integers that occur within the LDAP protocol are generally constrained 
to maxInt, 2^31 - 1, but no such constraint applies anywhere else. Do you use 
a multi-precision math library to generate the decimal representation of these 
integers?

For now we've copied the OpenSSL library's behavior, which is to use decimal 
for up to 31 bit numbers, and just output the hexadecimal octets for anything 
larger. But this clearly doesn't conform to the GSER definition of INTEGER.

As an aside, I really wish we were using hex for the canonical Integer 
representation; then any system could manipulate integers of any size 
independently of any native word size...
--
  -- Howard Chu
  Chief Architect, Symas Corp.  http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun        http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP     http://www.openldap.org/project/

_______________________________________________
Ldapext mailing list
Ldapext@ietf.org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ldapext