X.500-Related Golang Libraries

This is a workspace for several X.500-directory and X.509 PKI-related libraries (and perhaps even tools, one day) written in Go. They are:

• nsap-address: ITU-T Rec. X.213 NSAP decoding and encoding
• teletex: ITU-T Rec. T.61 Teletex string decoding
• x500: Data types and related functionality from the ITU-T X.500 series of recommendations describing X.500 directories, including decoding and encoding using Golang's standard encoding/asn1.
• x500-dap-client: A fully-featured X.500 Directory Access Protocol (DAP) over Internet Directly Mapped (IDM) protocol client, as described in ITU-T Recommendation X.519.

Warnings

Almost all types in SchemaAdministration.asn1 will decode with errors if the UniversalString alternative is used for the description fields. I kind of had no choice to but to do it like this. Blame Go's encodings/asn1 module.

X.500 Directory Implementation

If you are interested in working with X.500 directories, consider checking out Meerkat DSA, which, to my knowledge, is one of the two free and open source X.500 directory implementations out there, written by yours truly.

How to Publish New Versions

(It wasn't obvious to me how to do this, so I am documenting it here.) If you upgrade x500, create a Git tag x500/v#.#.#. Then run GOPROXY=proxy.golang.org go list -m github.com/Wildboar-Software/x500-go/x500@v#.#.#. This will cause the Go packages index to update... but it will take a half an hour for it to show up. It seems to take even longer for the search index to update with tags, text, keywords, etc.

Developer Notes

SET OF SEQUENCE = Just use the set tag SEQUENCE OF SET = Not supported by Golang. See: golang/go#27426 SET OF SET = I am not sure what to do here.

TODO

MVP

• Even higher-level API
• Change int32 to int
• Use X500OperationError (I might not do this...)
• Fix ambiguous parsing in SchemaAdministration caused by UnboundedDirectoryString
• Fill in critical extensions appropriately
• Documentation
• Reflection API (See Below)

Future

• Complete NSAP library
• Add types defined in newer X.500 specifications
  • I think I will wait until the newest version is released.
• Support other SASL methods:
  • EXTERNAL
  • ANONYMOUS
  • OTP
• Support more DSAInfo attributes

Reflection API

My vision is that it would look something like this:

type Person struct {
  CommonName []string `x500:"oid:2.5.4.3,must"`
  Surname []string `x500:"oid:2.5.4.6,may"`
}

And it would be used like:

var attrs []x500.Attribute = idm.CreateAttributes(ctx, &person)

Or

idm.Create(ctx, &person)

And

idm.ReadAndUnmarshal(ctx, dn, &person)

Consult: https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.23.5:src/encoding/asn1/marshal.go;l=736