Re: [openpgp] Fingerprints

[David Shaw <[e-mail]>]

On Apr 15, 2015, at 4:04 PM, Christoph Anton Mitterer <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2015-04-15 at 12:11 -0700, Jon Callas wrote:
>> There was a proposal that floated around that defined an extended
>> fingerprint to be an algorithm number followed by the actual bits.
>> For example, ASCII-fied 23:ABCDEF0123...FF. There's an obvious binary
>> representation. There's an obvious way to truncate that as well --
>> just decide if you truncate little-endian or big. (Personally, despite
>> being a little-endian bigot, this is a place where network byte order
>> is even to me the obvious win.)
>> The major advantage of this is that you can define it and then you
>> never have to change it again. We don't have to have any arguments
>> over what hash function is proper to use, etc. An implementation can
>> decide to support or not support whatever.
> +1
> 
> But shouldn't one define better the number to be either a string?
> Sure a one byte number with 255 possible future algorithms seem plenty
> enough, but people also once thought that about 32bit IPv4 addresses,
> two digit year numbers and so on.

Using a string is fine, but even with numbers, there is no rule that the number has to be a single byte.  After enough years and algorithms added, it could be "100000:ABCDEF0123..."

Whether it's a string or number, there has to be a list for what number/string means what algorithm.  Once you have a list, it doesn't really matter if it's a string or a number.

David