Obtaining SSL certificate info from SSL object - proposal

["Martin v. Löwis"]

John Nagle schrieb:
>     SSL certificates are trees, represented in a format, "ASN.1", which
>     allows storing numbers, strings, and flags.
>     Fields are identified by names or by assigned "OID numbers"
>     (see RFC 2459).
> 
>     The tree is returned as tuples.  The first element of the tuple
>     is always a string giving the name of the field, and the second
>     element is a string, Boolean, or number giving the value, or
>     a list of more tuples.  The result is a tree, which will
>     resemble the tree typically displayed by browsers displaying
>     SSL certificates.

That looks like a bad choice of interface to me. If you want to expose
the entire certificate, you should do that using as a single byte
string, encoded in DER. The way you are representing it, you are losing
information (e.g. whether the string type was IA5String,
PrintableString, UTF8String), and I thought your complaint was that
the current interfaces lose information, so you should not add an
interface that makes the same mistake it tries to overcome.

Regards,
Martin