• Audio and video over the Internet, electronic commerce, digital certificates, secure email, radio paging, interactive television, financial service systems, networking and computing operating systems use ASN.1 and its encoding rules.
• Third- and fourth-generation wireless communications technologies (UMTS, LTE, and WiMAX 2) rely on ASN.1 for all the interactions between a mobile device and the carrier's network that make a cellular phone call possible and which support Internet connectivity from a mobile device.. fin
• ASN.1 software is used in Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Outlook. It is also found in wireless applications from Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola. ASN.1 is used in cryptography technology used to provide security for credit card purchases over the Internet. Biometrics, ATM transactions, 800-number call routing to local carriers, plane take-offs and landings all rely on ASN.1. When FedEx tracks a package, it is done thanks to ASN.1.
• Millions of cars and trucks are produced every year using diagnostic monitoring systems that rely on ASN.1. ASN.1 messages are used in the detection of faults in production equipment and to dispatch maintenance personnel

ASN.1 is a critical part of our daily lives; it's everywhere, but it works so well it's invisible.

• ASN.1 is heavily used in the X.500 Directory technology, particularly to specify requests and modifications of the Directory Access Protocol (DAP) attributes.
  
• LDAP, a simpler protocol for directory access, is also specified in ASN.1.

• Digital certificates provide an important element of security. One of the most popular standards specifying the contents of a digital certificate is X.509. A certificate is a document, issued by a trusted agent, stating that the public key of the person named in the document has a certain value. You are most likely to encounter certificates when you use a web browser. The Recommendation ITU-T X.509 specifies a certificate using ASN.1 and encodes it using DER.

• Similarly the Public Key Cryptography Standard PKCS#7 describes with ASN.1 the syntax of a digitally signed and/or encrypted message, whose encryption key information and with digital signature information is encoded in BER. The standard was produced in 1991 by a consortium of computer manufacturers and the MIT.
• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) was originally developed by Netscape. The Transport Layer Security 1.0 (RFC 2246) standard was based on SSLv3 and was written to standardize the popular and widely used SSL protocol within the IETF, mandating the use of freely available algorithms.
• Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME, RFC 2630) specifies a way of sending and receiving secure email. It provides authentication, message integrity, non-repudiation and confidentiality, by the use of digital signatures and encryption using Public Key Cryptography. It is fundamentally based on the Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS) specification (RFC 2630) which specifies encapsulation syntax for such cryptographically enhanced data. CMS is derived from PKCS#7 (RFC 2315) and is heavily based on ASN.1 data structures.
• Any protocol making use of RSA encryption (RFC 2313) will generally be using ASN.1 for handling the RSA keys, certificates and signatures, and this includes the already mentioned SSL/TLS and S/MIME. In addition, protocols making use of other forms of Public Key Cryptography, such as Diffie-Hellman and DSS will generally be using encodings based on PKCS#1. Indeed, this is the case for the Internet Key Exchange (IKE, RFC 2409) which is used with IPsec Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) in cases where certificates are required because pre-shared secrets are either not considered secure enough or cannot scale sufficiently.

• SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) is a standard developed by a consortium of US companies (Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Netscape, IBM, and others) to secure financial exchanges over the Internet. It is based on the public-key cryptography standard PKCS#7 and on the X.509 Directory [ITU-T X.509]. It provides the following services: confidentiality of the information of the transaction, integrity of the transferred data, and authentication of the account owner and of the business party.
• The French national organization GIE Cartes Bancaires, in charge of creating specifications for cards, developed a standard, adapted from the SET standard and called C-SET (Chip-SET). This standard, which is also specified in ASN.1, relies on the card itself to secure the transaction and thus avoids the exchange of authentication certificates.

• The computer network authentication protocol Kerberos, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is designed for securing data exchanges within the network of a university or any other organization. Starting with the fifth version of Kerberos, the data transfers have been specified in ASN.1.

• RFC 1510
• RFC 1964

Biometrics:

• ISO/IEC 19785 (Common Biometric Exchange Formats Framework, or CBEFF) is an international standard that promotes interoperability of biometric-based application programs and systems developed by different vendors by facilitating biometric data interchange. It specifies a set of abstract data elements as well as a number of alternative formats for the representation of biometric information. Many of those formats are specified in ASN.1.
• ISO/IEC 24781 (BioAPI Interworking Protocol, or BIP) is an international standard that specifies the syntax, semantics, and encodings of a set of messages that enable an application to request biometric services over a network. All BIP messages are specified in ASN.1.
• ISO/IEC 24761 (Authentication Context for Biometrics, or ACBio), is an international standard that specifies a mechanism for increasing the reliability of biometric verification operations conducted inside a remote device or system. ACBio applies public-key cryptography techniques to secure each stage of a biometric verification process. The security-related information produced during each stage is collected into a list of "authentication context instances", whose format is specified in ASN.1.

• The ANSI standard X9.84 (Biometric information management and security) provides strong identification and authentication in electronic communications across uncontrolled public networks, such as the Internet. In the X9.84 standard, the syntax for biometric technology types, processing algorithms, and matching methods are described using ASN.1. The standard strongly recommends that ASN.1 be used in open systems where biometric data is communicated between disparate computing platforms or vendor (biometric) software. Examples of biometric messages using both DER and PER encoding rules are provided.

• In the USA, the ANSI X.9 committee, which numbers more than 300 members (banks, investors, software companies, and associations) is responsible for developing national standards to facilitate financial operations such as electronic payments on the Internet, secure on-line banking, business messaging, fund transfer, etc. All the standards describing these data transfers are specified in ASN.1.

• The Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), the third-generation cellular telephony technology developed by the 3GPP, heavily relies on ASN.1 and PER for the exchange of control messages between the mobile device and the base station and between different types of nodes within the mobile operator's radio access network.
• LTE, the fourth-generation cellular technology designed by the 3GPP as an evolution of UMTS, also uses ASN.1 for its control messages. So does LTE-Advanced, the successor of LTE.

• UMTS forum
• 3GPP project

• IEEE 802.16m, also known as WiMAX Version 2, the successor of IEEE 802.16e (WiMAX), is another wireless communications standard that uses ASN.1 and PER for its control messages.
• TAP3 (Transferred Account Procedure) is the file format used by mobile network operators to exchange billing information about roaming subscribers. A TAP3 file contains charges for the use of the service by each roaming subscriber as well as customer care information to be used in case the subscriber contacts the mobile operator. The TAP3 format is specified in ASN.1.

• What is TAP3?

• The Intelligent Network (IN) is a public switched telephone network architecture developed by Bellcore (now Telcordia) and ITU-T. It was created to provide a variety of advanced telephony services such as 800-number translation, local number portability, call forwarding, call screening, and wireless integration. The IN uses the SS7 signaling protocol (a worldwide telephony standard) in which voice or modem data travels through circuit-switched voice switches, while control signals travel over an SS7 packet-switched network. INAP (Intelligent Network Application Part) is an IN protocol used in an SS7 network to query databases for a variety of functions not related to call setup and tear-down. INAP uses ASN.1 for defining message content.

• The Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and all supplementary telephone services such as reverse charging, closed user groups, and international calling card verification, use ASN.1 and BER.

• ASN.1 and BER are used in routing 800-number telephone calls.

• Each call placed on a cellular telephone in North America, Europe, Japan and elsewhere results in the exchange of TCAP protocol messages, which are specified using ASN.1 and encoded using the Basic Encoding Rules (BER) of ASN.1.

• The Computer Supported Telecommunications Applications (CSTA) standards specify the structure of the messages exchanged between equipment and computing applications in ASN.1 using BER.

• Many protocols related to multimedia are specified using ASN.1. Some examples are audiovisual and multimedia systems (ITU-T H.200 series), videophone over ISDN (Rec. ITU-T H.320), real-time multimedia communication over the Internet (Rec. ITU-T H.225, ITU-T H.245, ITU-T H.323), and fax over the Internet (Rec. ITU-T T.38).

• H.323 Information site  
• H.323 Forum 
• H.323 and SIP comparison

• In the domain of videoconferencing, the ITU-T T.120 series of ITU-T Recommendations describes a multithread architecture of data communications in the context of a multimedia conference. It describes the establishment of telephone meetings independent of the underlying network as well as the exchange of many types of data (binary files, still images, notes, etc.) among the participants during the meeting. The data protocol is specified in ASN.1 and the encoding is PER.

• Air-ground and ground-ground protocols employed by the Federal Aviation Administration and International Civil Aviation Organization are described in ASN.1 and are encoded in PER. The Aeronautical Telecommunication Network (ATN), which has been operational in Europe since 2007, is specified with ASN.1 and uses the compact PER encoding. ASN.1 encoders/decoders are now installed on American Airlines B767 aircraft in the certified ATN compliant avionics from Rockwell Collins

• The market of telematics applied to transport information and control systems (TICS) is growing steadily. The progress of satellite navigation systems, digital cartography, and mobile telecommunications may make it possible to optimize the management of taxi or public transport vehicle fleets and smooth over the road traffic with intelligent signals and information transmission to individual navigation systems. According to technical report ISO/TR 14813-6:2002 "Transport information and control systems - Reference model architecture(s) for the TICS sector", "the use of ASN.1 is now widely accepted and adopted by many Technical Committees and Working Groups of ISO and CEN. ISO TC 204 has resolved that ASN.1 shall be the normal syntax notation used in syntax and encoding rule elaboration in Standards in the TICS sector." Protocols of the intelligent transport domain are encoded in PER Unaligned.

• Information site about intelligent transport
• ISO/TC 204

• Here are some transportation standards that use ASN.1:

- ISO/TS 14816:2005:
Road transport and traffic telematics - Automatic vehicle and equipment identification - Numbering and data structure.

- ISO/TS 14904:2002:
Road transport and traffic telematics - Electronic fee collection (EFC) - Interface specification for clearing between operators.

- ISO/TS 17575:2011:
Application Interface Definition for Electronic Fee Collection (EFC) based on Global Navigation Satellite Systems and Cellular Networks (GNSS/CN).

• Parcel delivery companies use ASN.1 to track their packages.

• Electric and gas utilities companies use ASN.1 and BER. ASN.1 and BER-encoded messages are used in controlling the latest generation of substations, transformers, RTU's and IED's, among others.

• Radio-Frequency Identification (or RFID) is implemented in numerous industrial sectors (person or vehicle identification, stock management, etc.). The electronic tags are actually miniaturized radio emitters that can be read from a few centimeters to several meters off, even through obstacles that would prevent the use of barcodes, for instance.

• The ISO/IEC 7816-4 standard uses BER for exchanging data with integrated circuit cards with contacts. The majority of chip cards and smart cards used in Europe and in the US conform to this standard. 

• TThe technical committee TC 251 in charge of Health Informatics at the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) published the ENV 12018 standard "Identification, administrative, and common clinical data structure for Intermittently Connected Devices used in healthcare" where the data structures are described in ASN.1.

• In the USA, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) owns GenBank, a database featuring around 135 million DNA sequences (as of April 2011). Every day the NCBI exchanges DNA sequence data with its European and Japanese counterparts. The National Library of Medicine designed four databases of scientific publications (the Unified Medical Language System, UMLS) whose exchange formats are specified in ASN.1.

• The standards for interchange, encoding and storage of digital electro-cardiography developed in the European research project AIM 1 use ASN.1.

• In the context of the European research project ESPRIT 2, an application demonstration has shown how the Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) and File Transfer Access and Management (FTAM) standards can be used together to enable remote access to individual pictures within a CGM.

• There are eight MHEG (Multimedia and Hypermedia information coding Expert Group) object classes that are defined both in ASN.1 and in SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). These classes can transparently exchange objects encoded in many different formats (JPEG, MPEG, text, etc.), including proprietary formats. MHEG objects can be icons or buttons that trigger actions when clicked, and are independent of the application and of the presentation.

• Since its creation in 1992, the ANSI Z39.50 protocol (ISO 10163-1 standard) has been specified in ASN.1 and encoded in BER. A variant of this protocol was used in the WAIS service (Wide Area Information Server) to make all kinds of information accessible on the Internet (library catalogs, directories, FTP archives, newsgroups, images, source code, multimedia documents, etc.). It provides facilities for keyword search, for extending a search by including new criteria to be applied to the documents already found, and for downloading selected documents. The Z39.50 protocol is mainly used in libraries and information centers.

• ASN.1 has appeared for quite a long time now in many Requests For Comments (RFC) that specify traditional Internet protocols. RFC 1189 (The Common Information Services and Protocols for the Internet, CMOT and CMIP) and RFC 1157 (A Simple Network Management Protocol, SNMP) are two alternative protocols allowing a network to control and evaluate the performance of a remote network element.

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