An OI value contained in a message being processed by the encode/decode component of CMIP services is not valid. If the message being processed is a string message from an application program the OI is not a legal dotted-decimal value. If the message is a BER buffer from a peer application program we have to trust the peer to have encoded a valid OI (it is only bits, after all). If this happens it will be preceded by one of two messages. One (PROGRAM_CHECK) indicates that the peer sent us an OI that will take more than 300 bytes to store in the string form. The other (MALLOC_ERROR) indicates we could not allocate memory.