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Putting the signature in URL would force them to break linksPutting the signature in URL would force them to break linksPosted Jul 6, 2011 21:06 UTC (Wed) by Tov (guest, #61080)In reply to: Putting the signature in URL would force them to break links by zooko Parent article: Vsftpd backdoor discovered in source code (The H)
Wouldn't base62 encoding create problems in case-insensitive environments (e.g. when stored on a FAT filesystem)?
I would rather sacrifice a bit longer filenames for robustness and human readability (when comparing hashes).
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Putting the signature in URL would force them to break links Posted Jul 6, 2011 21:41 UTC (Wed) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]
Yeah, you're partially right about case-insensitive filesystems like VFAT or NTFS. Actually nothing would go terribly wrong on such a filesystem except that the chance of collisions would be less astronomically unlikely. However, it still smells a bit icky to have only astronomical collision-resistance instead of super-duper-astronomical collision-resistance, depending on your local filesystem.
Also you're right that base-62 is harder to read aloud than other encoding (because you have to say "uppercase" and/or "lowercase" a lot). An alternative that addresses these two issues is base-32, e.g.:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/zbase32/
rationale for zbase32 versus RFC 4648:
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/zbase32/browser/trunk/zbase32/...
On the other hand the more compact result of base-62 makes it a little easier to cut and paste, which is probably more common than reading aloud nowadays.
Here are the examples again.
base-16 (hex):
base-32 (zbase32):
base-62 (zbase62):
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