Timeline for Looking at hash output – is Base64 encoding in any way better than HEX encoding?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
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| Jul 12, 2022 at 16:49 | history | edited | Maarten Bodewes♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 7, 2021 at 7:59 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc with https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc
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| Apr 11, 2020 at 23:41 | history | edited | Maarten Bodewes♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 29, 2019 at 11:22 | history | edited | Maarten Bodewes♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 29, 2019 at 10:38 | history | edited | Maarten Bodewes♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 29, 2019 at 10:27 | history | edited | Maarten Bodewes♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 58 characters in body
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| Jul 30, 2017 at 0:47 | comment | added | chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic- | It's also easier for programmers to debug crypto code when the "correct" answers are in hex, which corresponds directly to the byte array in question. | |
| Jul 29, 2017 at 17:40 | comment | added | guysherman |
Also worth noting, that if you are putting encoded values into urls, HEX is url-safe, whereas base64 is not - because it uses / and + characters. You can get url-safe versions of base64 which substitute / with _ and + with -.
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| Jul 28, 2017 at 23:12 | comment | added | supercat | ...but if people who receive a file randomly pick part of the hex signature to validate, phony files would likely get caught at by at least some users, who could then sound the alarm for everyone else.] | |
| Jul 28, 2017 at 23:11 | comment | added | supercat | Certain kinds of hashes are as likely to be validated by human eyeballs as by machines, while others are intended to be compared solely by machines. If a hash will be processed solely by machines, base64 or base85 would likely be a more efficient choice than hex, but some humans may be more able to look at two hex strings and say whether they "seem" identical than would be possible with base64 [if someone replaced a file with a malicious one chosen so that the first 10%, last 10%, and middle 10% of the hex hash matched even though the rest were random garbage, some people might not notice... | |
| Jul 28, 2017 at 17:41 | history | edited | e-sushi | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Fixed some typos – which I guess were the result of today being a friday. ;)
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| Jul 28, 2017 at 16:54 | vote | accept | Richard R. Matthews | ||
| Jul 28, 2017 at 15:47 | history | answered | Maarten Bodewes♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |