On 01/18/2011 12:48 PM, Jon Callas wrote: > If we combine it with a hash-independent fingerprint -- e.g., first byte is an algorithm ID, others are the actual hash -- then we can put it in now and then run with it. Daniel Nagy suggests that we also change the material being hashed in the fingerprint (he wants to leave out the creation date). If that proposal ends up achieving consensus then your proposal here will need further modification. Does anyone feel strongly about Nagy's proposal, by the way? i'm not sure what the tradeoffs are. Even without that concern, if we encourage super-flexible use like this, user agents who wanted to use it to test for the presence of a given key in an indexed keystore would need to index their keys with every possible digest that might be used -- that seems excessive somehow. (and unlikely that keyserver implementations would want a half-dozen indexes, for that matter) Wouldn't it be better to just implement it for today's fingerprint, and then when a new fingerprint is agreed upon, determine (by subpacket length maybe?) whether it's the new fingerprint or the old one. Compliant user agents would keep the two indexes around until the v4 fingerprint goes away, and then drop the old one. Alternately, we could embed the algorithm ID as you suggest, and SHOULD people into generating them using only the consensus fingerprint algorithms so that reasonable user agents only need to create indexes over SHA1 (now) and SHA3 (whenever that happens). --dkg
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