ASN.1 tools for Python

Whenever data structures are described in some machine and programming
language independent and unambiguous way, such specification is called
abstract syntax, by contrast with machine/language specific methods,
which are called 'concrete' or 'transfer' syntaxes.

Abstract syntaxes appear useful in networking as a tool for engineering
protocols in a clear and portable way. Moreover, once a protocol is
described in some abstract language, protocol parsers and builders
could be automatically generated for various computing
architectures/programming languages, thus saving engineers from
implementing low-level transport details by hand.

Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) is a set of ITU standards
defining particular implementation of abstract data description
language accompanied by a collection of transfer encoding methods.
Perhaps the most widely used among these data serialization methods
is Basic Encoding Rules (BER) together with its derivatives (DER and
CER), while Packed Encoding Rules (PER) aims at most compact data
representation whilst in the wire.