Extending EASE with new ASN.1 encoding rules
EASE (R. Lai, A. Lo, EASE: a software environment for automatic implementation of application protocol, SoftwarePractice and Experience, 26(1) (1996) 83103) is a software tool that integrates Estelle and ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation One) specifications to produce an integrated specification for application layer protocol, from which an automatic implementation can be generated. EASE, though a new tool, is already outdated because of the recent changes, including new syntaxes, and additions of encoding rules, to the 1994 ASN.1 standard. Building a complete compiler that supports the full ASN.1:94 standard is a huge task; many researchers and developers only implement a subset of the standard that meets their requirements, while others use tools for building certain stages of such a compiler. For EASE to keep in line with the 1994 standard, it is a big task and requires a major rewrite; the only two encoding rules that could be added to EASE without implementing the full 1994 ASN.1 syntaxes are the canonical encoding rules (CER) and the distinguished encoding rules (DER). This paper describes how EASE has been extended to include these new rules, and aims to provide researchers and developers with the lessons learned from this work, and with some pointers to developing an ASN.1 compiler that complies with the 1994 standard.
ease asn.1 estelle canonical encoding rules distinguished encoding rules