2 ASN.1

2.1 Introduction

ASN.1 is a formal language for describing data structures to be exchanged between distributed computer systems. The purpose of ASN.1 is to have a platform and programming language independent notation to express types using a standardized set of rules for the transformation of values of a defined type into a stream of bytes. This stream of bytes can then be sent on any type of communication channel. This way, two applications written in different programming languages running on different computers, and with different internal representation of data, can exchange instances of structured data types.