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> The main advantage of ASN.1 (specifically DER) in an HTTPS/PKI context is that it's a canonical encoding. To my understanding Protobuf isn't; I don't know about Thrift.

There should be no need for a canonical encoding. 40 years ago people thought you needed that so you could re-encode a TBSCertificate and then validate a signature, but in reality you should keep the encoding as-received of that part of the Certificate. And so on.





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