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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Specifying dissectors declaratively

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2017 11:46:34 -0700
On Apr 19, 2017, at 2:27 AM, Ahmad Fatoum <ahmad@xxxxxx> wrote:

> • ASN.1: asn2wrs, part of Wireshark and supports packed encoding rules (PER), but I believe it's not possible to decode an arbitrary non-ASN.1 encoded protocol [1]. Is that right?

ASN.1 doesn't specify encoding, just the "abstract syntax".  There are multiple encoding rules that specify the encoding.

asn2wrs only handles BER and PER, so it can't handle protocols not using them - which also includes protocols not specified by ASN.1 at all - but if asn2wrs were to handle the Encoding Control Notation:

	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoding_Control_Notation

it might be able to handle any protocol whose abstract syntax could be specified by ASN.1 and whose encoding could be specified by ECN.