[Cryptography] Uniform Data Fingerprint

Arnold Reinhold agr at me.com
Mon Jun 1 10:27:42 EDT 2015


A small suggestion: instead of slavishly following RFC4648 Base-32 format, I would suggest a modified Base-32 where the letters I, O, and L  are excluded from the encoding alphabet as they are too easily confused with the digits 0 and 1 (L being confusing in lower case). Maybe exclude S as well for potential confusion with 5. Only 32 of the possible 36 characters are needed, so excluding three or four characters poses no technical problem. Here is a worst-case example I concocted: 0lSS0-l1151-I5S1O-I05S1 Of course the potential for confusion is font dependent but I don’t think it is practical to specify fonts in such a standard.

Since the fingerprint strings are intended for human recognition, we should do everything possible to minimize confusion.  At the standards writing stage, this is a cheap improvement.

Arnold Reinhold



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