asn1ate -- ASN.1 translation library. Copyright 2013-2015 Schneider Electric Buildings AB Introduction ------------ ``asn1ate`` is a Python library for translating ASN.1 into other forms. It is intended for code generation from formal ASN.1 definitions, and a code generator for ``pyasn1`` is included. Additional code for the ``Quick DER`` format was added later. ``asn1ate`` is released under a 3-clause BSD license. For details, see LICENSE.txt. Caveat ------ This is very much an alpha-quality prototype. Things that need doing: * Regression test suite * HACK/TODO/BUGs need to be fixed * ASN.1 grammar is very incomplete in some places. Known issues: - Constraint syntax is currently limited to simple value range constraints (ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-12/pkcs-12.asn, line 53) - Reference syntax is not accepted at all (ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-12/pkcs-12.asn, line 74) * Improve parser error handling/reporting * Allow for semantic analysis, e.g. validity check, warnings for problematic constructs, etc. Usage with pyasn1 ----------------- The immediate use of ``asn1ate`` is to generate ``pyasn1`` definitions from ASN.1 definitions. The command to do this is:: $ python .../asn1ate/pyasn1gen.py source.asn1 It will print the ``pyasn1`` equivalent of ``source.asn1`` to stdout. Usage with Quick DER -------------------- Quick DER is a library found on https://github.com/vanrein/quick-der A separate generator exists in ``asn1ate`` to create the parser bytecode and overlay structures for this format. The command to do this is:: $ python .../asn1ate/asn2quickder.py source.asn1 It will store an include file suitable for use with ``Quick DER`` in ``source.h``, which is the source file name with its extension changed to ``.h``. This tool can be used for your private ASN.1 projects, but one purpose of Quick DER is also to have a developer's toolkit with precompiled header files that can simply be included as #include Dependencies ------------ The only third-party dependency is ``pyparsing``. Although ``asn1ate`` was initially developed on Python 3.2, it has been tested with Python 2.7 and should port to older Python versions easily. Latest release tested with: * Python 3.4.0 * Python 2.7.3 Design notes ------------ The ``asn1ate`` package is designed along the same lines as a compiler with a driver, a parser, a semantic model and a convention for code generators. * ``parser.py`` -- a tokenizing parser for ASN.1 per X.680. It currently recognizes a naive sub-set of X.680 * ``sema.py`` -- a semantic ASN.1 object model, which can be constructed from the AST generated by ``parser.py`` * ``support/pygen.py`` -- a support library for generating Python code. * ``pyasn1gen.py`` -- a code generator to transform a semantic model into ``pyasn1`` syntax. This can be used as a script in which case it will dump output to stdout. * ``asn2quickder.py`` -- a code generator to transform a semantic model into ``Quick DER`` include file syntax. This can be used as a command. The ASN.1 parser is very ad-hoc, I've experimented with the grammar until I found something that accepted our proprietary ASN.1 definition. It's based on ``pyparsing`` but sets up parse actions to build an annotated AST. Every node of interest is annotated with a string denoting its type, e.g. ``Identifier``, ``TypeAssignment``, etc. I've tried to stay with token types as named in X.680, but added custom ones or suppressed others, as necessary to get the AST in a useful shape. Annotated tokens are represented by a simple class containing the type name and a list of children (called ``elements``) which may be annotated tokens, lists or simple values. This gives a very discoverable tree structure, but there are probably cleaner AST representations we could use. Patches welcome. ``asn1ate.sema`` is an object model that represents ASN.1 constructs. It describes everything from type assignments to default values and tags, but still only the parts of ASN.1 we happen to use here. Most of the logic revolves around transforming the AST produced by ``asn1ate.parser`` into a more semantic model with proper Python objects. Codegen is designed to be extensible. In-house we have a set of code generators to build an entire protocol stack based on an ASN.1 source, but ``asn1ate`` only includes the generally useful one, ``asn1ate.pyasn1gen``. The most notable members of ``asn1ate.support`` are probably the ``PythonWriter`` and ``PythonFragment`` classes, which simplify generation of correctly indented Python code.