Welcome to ASN Lab! ASN Lab is a pioneering and leading provider of ASN.1 tools for information technology. We're a small, creative team and we're passionate about powering the world's creativity.

We aims to develop tools that simplify and automate your working with ASN.1 specifications. Our ASN.1 tools include: an IDE, the ASN.1 Development Tools that bring the power of software development environments to the specification language ASN.1, and compilers and runtime libraries that minimize your development time and effort. We are on the cutting edge of bringing all type of systems into communication in the rapidly changing world.

Our initial product is a plugin for Eclipse which brings the enhanced productivity of a software design environment to writing ASN.1. This product has been in development for several years and has been used in the development of ASN.1 specifications.

These products have been easily customized based on user requirements and has supported many different features ranging from editor, syntax checker, compiler to message analyzer. Currently we have a stable product for ASN.1 which contains many advanced editing features (rapidly being expanded as we continue to port features from our existing toolset). These products are shipped as plugins of Eclipse and highly integerated with the Eclipse platform.

What is ASN.1?

ASN.1 is a formal notation used for describing data transmitted by telecommunications protocols, regardless of language implementation and physical representation of these data, whatever the application, whether complex or very simple.

ASN.1 sends information in any form (audio, video, data, etc.) anywhere it needs to be communicated digitally. ASN.1 only covers the structural aspects of information (there are no operators to handle the values once these are defined or to make calculations with). Therefore it is not a programming language.

One of the main reasons for the success of ASN.1 is that this notation is associated with several standardized encoding rules such as the BER (Basic Encoding Rules), or more recently the PER (Packed Encoding Rules), which prove useful for applications that undergo restrictions in terms of bandwidth. These encoding rules describe how the values defined in ASN.1 should be encoded for transmission (i.e., how they can be translated into the bytes 'over the wire' and reverse), regardless of machine, programming language, or how it is represented in an application program. ASN.1's encodings are more streamlined than many competing notations, enabling rapid and reliable transmission of extensible messages -- an advantage for wireless broadband. Because ASN.1 has been an international standard since 1984, its encoding rules are mature and have a long track record of reliability and interoperability.

An ASN.1 definition can be readily mapped (by a pre-runtime processor) into a C or C++ or Java data-structure that can be used by application code, and supported by runtime libraries providing encoding and decoding of representations in either an XML or a TLV format, or a very compact packed encoding format.

ASN.1 is widely used in industry sectors where efficient (low-bandwidth, low-transaction-cost) computer communications are needed, but is also being used in sectors where XML-encoded data is required (for example, transfer of biometric information).

Why ASN.1?

ASN.1 has been adopted in the communications protocol specifacation of

• Telecommunications, including 3GPP mobile phones
• Intelligent Transport Systems ITS
• Internet voice communications technology in the VoIP
• Multimedia standards
• Security-related systems, including smart-cards and certificates - the basis for e-commerce
• Embedded systems communications
• Air traffic control

and many of other systems in recent years.

Next...

Continue to the ASN.1 Products page to find out more about how our ASN.1 tools can meet your ASN.1 requirements.