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Object Identifiers
ASN.1 might be of only passing interest were it not for the
OBJECT IDENTIFIER
[4] data type. An OBJECT
IDENTIFIER
is a simple ASN.1 data type
with special properties.
An OBJECT IDENTIFIER
is a data type denoting an
authoritatively named object, regardless of the
type of the object which it names.
It is written as a sequence of non-negative integer values which
describe a traversal of a tree. The tree consists of a root
connected to a number of labelled nodes via
edges.
Each label consists of a non-negative integer value and an optional
brief textual description (or Object
Descriptor
). The most common format for writing down the
value of an OBJECT IDENTIFIER
is as a dotted
sequence, thus:
1.0.8571.5.1
This identifies the object found by starting at the root, moving to
the node with label 1, then moving to the node with label 0, and so
on. The node found after traversing this list is the one being
identified.
[4] and the related
Object Descriptor
type.
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