On 27/09/11 18:10, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> On the digest front the objective would be to make it possible to use
> the URI format with any digest at all in theory but strongly encourage
> people to only use the digests IETF is confident in. Use of OIDs as
> the identifier has the nice property that anyone can get an identifier
> to distinguish their algorithm from other people's but getting an OID
> does not produce any paper trail that can be used to imply an IETF
> endorsement.

But it also makes the identifiers less human readable and much longer
than they could otherwise be.

> We could add in support for the text based identifiers as well, but
> since the only identifiers that I would want to encourage are SHA2 and
> SHA3, I don't see a need. 

Why does it take so many bytes to determine between a very small number
of options?

Worrying about clashes in the text-based identifiers people use seems
somewhat unnecessary. How many hash algorithms with the same name (or
without an obvious canonical name) are there? If this was really a
problem, we could have a microformats-like wiki registry:
http://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values

> For all applications that make sense it is
> going to be perfectly OK to simply generate the prefix for the
> identifier part as a static array of octets and append / verify it as
> such whenever it is needed. I do not see any need to write ASN.1
> handling code for these apps :-)

Then why use ASN.1 at all?

Counter-proposal: how about:

digest:SHA1,<base64 string of digest>

Like a data: URL, except without the option for ASCII/URL encoding:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme

For bonus points, allow multiple comma-separated digests to ease
algorithm migration.

Simple :-)

Gerv

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