DER: Over-eager consumption in AnyRef

[woodruffw]

This is a discrete issue for the behavior I'm seeing while testing #813, specifically in #813 (comment).

There, we have a struct that's annotated like so:

#[derive(Clone, Copy, Debug, Eq, PartialEq, Sequence)]
pub struct EncapsulatedContentInfo<'a> {
    /// indicates the type of content.
    pub e_content_type: ObjectIdentifier,

    /// encapsulated content
    #[asn1(context_specific = "0", optional = "true", tag_mode = "EXPLICIT")]
    pub e_content: Option<AnyRef<'a>>,
}

My expectation is that this definition would consume a DER structure like this:

SEQUENCE
  OBJECT IDENTIFIER 1.2.3.4
  [0]
    SEQUENCE
      ANYTHING HERE POSSIBLY JUST AN OCTET STRING

...leaving e_content_type as 1.2.3.4 and e_content as:

SEQUENCE
  ANYTHING HERE POSSIBLY JUST AN OCTET STRING

Experimentally, however, the borrowed slice in e_content's AnyRef contains:

ANYTHING HERE POSSIBLY JUST AN OCTET STRING

...meaning that the surrounding SEQUENCE was consumed. When I remove the #[asn1(...)] annotation from e_content, the behavior changes to what I expect:

SEQUENCE
  ANYTHING HERE POSSIBLY JUST AN OCTET STRING

This suggests a bug to me, somewhere in the interaction between the #[asn1(...)] annotation and AnyRef.

I'll work on a minimal reproduction now, but this behavior is currently visible with the PKCS7 blob I shared on the other PR (https://github.com/RustCrypto/formats/files/10270816/authroot.stl.zip) and the changes in that PR.

[woodruffw]

Looking at the Decode impl for AnyRef, this is maybe a design decision that we're just holding incorrectly on #813:

impl<'a> Decode<'a> for AnyRef<'a> {
    fn decode<R: Reader<'a>>(reader: &mut R) -> Result<AnyRef<'a>> {
        let header = Header::decode(reader)?;

        Ok(Self {
            tag: header.tag,
            value: ByteSlice::decode_value(reader, header)?,
        })
    }
}

AnyRef looks for and consumes a header, so its interaction with #[asn1(...)] is that the annotation consumes the context-specific tag, and then AnyRef consumes the SEQUENCE tag that immediately follows it. As a result, we've actually asked the parser two consume two headers, even though it looks (on first glance) like we've only asked it to consume one.

Given that, I don't think this is a bug in the der crate, just a point of API confusion 🙂. I can update AnyRef's documentation to clarify that it's a "consuming" type rather than merely peeks at the TLV structure, if that sounds good to you @tarcieri.

[woodruffw]

(This also makes sense given the decode_into API -- that's a consuming API that reuses the AnyRef's interior consumed tag, so it makes sense that AnyRef consumes the DER stream rather than just peeking it.)

[tarcieri]

@woodruffw yeah, that’s expected. If you want to store the original DER, use der::Document

[woodruffw]

Closing in that case, since this was entirely a misunderstanding of the APIs on my part!