Using certificates for SSH authentication

There have been vulnerabilities. But I struggle with the "complex" bit. Its just a TLV encoding, which man + dog uses everywhere. There is a some bit twiddling involved. I guess that's because it harks from an era when bits were a precious commodity. But the twiddling is no worse than UTF-8.

The one criticism you can make of it is all that bit twiddling makes decoding slow for a binary format. It's still far faster than JSON.

My problems with ASN.1 have never been due to the format itself. It's simple enough, yet can describe complex data structures with ease. The issue has always been that ISO in particular seems has never been a "less is more" style of place. Their idea of compromise seems to be to accept and every idea into the standard, provided the ideas sponsor throws enough money and man power at them. The problem with ASN.1 is it allows them to get away with that. Which I guess is why they use ASN.1 a lot. Which in turn means as soon as I see something is using ASN.1 I shudder. But not because of ASN.1 itself. It's because the thing it encodes will be a behemoth, with a million different knobs, all of which have to be in exactly the right place for it to work. The icing on the cake is ISO will want to charge you for the document that documents those knobs.