[erlang-questions] ASN.1 decode errors

Anthony Howe achowe@REDACTED
Fri Sep 20 20:50:52 CEST 2019


Thank you to those who contacted me concerning this problem.  It appears that
the issue was with the vendor's (lack of) documentation (and wrong ASN.1 spec.
cited by them) not explaining that the GPRS CDRs were wrapped in a binary file
format that was not part of the ASN.1 BER encoding.  So the Erlang ASN.1
compiler was correct, but the input was offset.

Anthony

On 2019-09-12 10:29, Anthony Howe wrote:
> I've written a couple ASN.1 BER and PER transcoders to JSON for LTE,
> TAP3, NRTRDE files before.  ( It was Erlang's open source ASN.1 support
> that got me to learn the language in the first place. )  I'm trying to
> write one now for GPRS charging records (ETSI TS 101 393 V7.4.0
> (2000-02)); I have something that builds, but does not decode the input
> and just reports a vague Erlang ASN error.
> 
> I figure the problem revolves around a mismatched set of ASN module
> files (which are a frik'n pain to find, but I digress).  Anyway, I
> figure if I understood the error better it might point me finally in the
> right direction.
> 
> So the error is...
> 
> $ ./_build/default/bin/gprsdump -r cdr_0f1
> cdr_0f1: processing...
> runtime error: cdr_0f1: {badmatch,
>                          {error,
>                           {asn1,
>                            {invalid_choice_tag,
>                             {1,
>                              <<0,168,161,129,165,128,1,19,131,8,48,36,128,
>                                1,113,0,0,63,164>>}}}}}
> 
> Reset of stack omitted.
> 
> My interpretation is that initial CallEventRecord choice 1
> (GGSNPDPRecord) is not decoding, but I have no idea what the binary is
> suppose to be telling me, other than "You Are Here in the BER input".
> 
> CallEventRecord	::= CHOICE
> {
> 	sgsnPDPRecord			[0] SGSNPDPRecord,
> 	ggsnPDPRecord			[1] GGSNPDPRecord,
> 	sgsnMMRecord			[2] SGSNMMRecord,
> 	sgsnSMORecord			[3] SGSNSMORecord,
> 	sgsnSMTRecord			[4] SGSNSMTRecord
> }
> 
> Any clues to would be welcome.
> 
> Right now its looking like I'll have to learn how to decode BER by hand
> in order to understand the failure better.  Maybe a generic BER to ASN
> syntax decoder tool?
> 
> 


-- 
Anthony C Howe         	                                    SnertSoft
achowe@REDACTED       Twitter: SirWumpus       BarricadeMX & Milters
http://snert.com/      http://nanozen.info/     http://snertsoft.com/



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