RE: BER and Attribute Syntax

["Steven Legg" <steven.legg@adacel.com.au>]

Dominic,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steinitz, Dominic J
> [mailto:Dominic.J.Steinitz@BritishAirways.com]
> Sent: Thursday, 21 June 2001 21:41
> To: ietf-ldapext
> Subject: BER and Attribute Syntax
>
>
> I hope this is the right mailing list for asking these sort
> of questions. If not can someone please direct me to the correct one.
>
> According to BER, the decimal number 1321should be encoded as
> Universal Primitive 2 1321= [2,2,5,41] but according to the
> attribute syntax definitions RFC2252 6.16, INTEGER attributes
> are encoded as a string of the decimal representation. So to
> encode an ASN.1 INTEGER we should use BER but to encode an
> INTEGER attribute we should produce an OctetString of the
> decimal value. Is this correct?

If by "an OctetString of the decimal value" you mean the four octets
with the decimal values 49, 51, 50 and 49, being the ASCII codes for
the characters `1', `3', `2' and `1' respectively, then the answer
is yes.

If you mean the two octets with the decimal values 5 and 41 then the
answer is no.

If the attribute value is instead transfered according to the LDAP ";binary"
attribute option (see RFC 2251) then the LDAP AttributeValue OCTET STRING
would contain the four octets with the decimal values 2, 2, 5 and 41
(i.e. a BER encoding stuffed into an ASN.1 OCTET STRING as the content).


Regards,
Steven

>
> Dominic.
>
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