unber -- the ASN.1 BER Decoder
Contents
Description
unber presents the internal structure of BER-encoded files as a human readable text. A single dash
denotes the standard input.
(The DER and CER formats are subsets of the BER and are also supported.)
Examples
Decode the given Tag/Length sequence specified in hexadecimal form:
unber -t "bf20"
Decode the DER file using two-spaces indentation:
unber -i2filename.der
Decode the binary stream taken from the standard input:
cat filename.der | unber -
Decode the binary stream and encode it back into an identical stream (see enber(1)):
cat filename.der | unber -p- | enber - > filename.berFootnotes
The constructed XML output is not necessarily well-formed.
When indefinite length encoding is being used, the BER sequence which is not terminated with the
end-of-content octets will cause the terminating </I> XML tag to disappear. Thus, invalid BER framing
directly causes invalid XML output.
The enber(1) utility understands such XML correctly.
Name
unber -- the ASN.1 BER Decoder
Options
-1 Do not attempt to read the next BER structure after the first one. This may be useful if the
input contains garbage past the single BER sequence. By default, unber continues decoding until
the end of file (input stream).
-iindent
Use the specified number of spaces for output indentation. Default is 4 spaces.
-m Generate shorter output while still preserving BER encoding information.
-p Do not attempt to pretty-print known ASN.1 types (BOOLEAN, INTEGER, OBJECT IDENTIFIER, etc). By
default, some ASN.1 types are converted into the text representation.
This option is required if the unber(1) output is used as an input to enber(1).
-sskip
Ignore the first skip bytes in the input stream; useful for stripping off lower level protocol
framing data.
-thex-string
Interpret the hex-string as a sequence of hexadecimal values representing the start of BER TLV
encoding. Print the human readable explanation.
See Also
enber(1), asn1c(1).
Synopsis
unber [-1] [-iindent] [-m] [-p] [-sskip] [-thex-string] [-] [input-filenames...]
Xml Format
unber dumps the output in the regular XML format which preserves most of the information from the
underlying binary encoding.
The XML opening tag format is as follows:
<tform O="off" T="tag" TL="t_len" V="{Indefinite|v_len}" [A="type"] [F]>
Where:
tform Encoding form the value is in: primitive ("P") or constructed ("C") or constructed with indefinite
length ("I")
off Offset of the encoded element in the unber input stream.
tag The tag class and value in human readable form.
t_len The length of the TL (BER Tag and Length) encoding.
v_len The length of the value (V, encoded by the L), may be "Indefinite".
type Likely name of the underlying ASN.1 type (for UNIVERSAL tags).
[F] Indicates that the value was reformatted (pretty-printed). This will never appear in the output
produced using the -p command line option.
ExampleXMLoutput:
<I O="0" T="[UNIVERSAL 16]" TL="2" V="Indefinite" A="SEQUENCE">
<P O="2" T="[UNIVERSAL 19]" TL="2" V="2" A="PrintableString">US</P>
<C O="6" T="[UNIVERSAL 16]" TL="2" V="6" A="SEQUENCE">
<P O="8" T="[UNIVERSAL 2]" TL="2" V="4" A="INTEGER" F>832970823</P>
</C O="14" T="[UNIVERSAL 16]" A="SEQUENCE" L="8">
</I O="14" T="[UNIVERSAL 0]" TL="2" L="16">
