Version 2 of SWHID, ISO/IEC 18670:2025?

[Simon Josefsson]

Stefano Zacchiroli <zack at upsilon.cc> writes:

> But kpcyrd is fully right: while we wanted to standardize SWHIDv1
> because it was already (de facto) used out there, SWHIDv2 with stronger
> hashes is needed and we are already working on it. Tentatively we want
> to simply switch to SHA-2, with SHA-256 hashes, which would be a
> relatively easy standard upgrade. But at the same time it will also make
> textual hashes much longer, so we would *also* like to offer some more
> compact representations of hashes than hex (possibly as an optional
> alternative to hex encoding).

How about using SHA3-256 and base64 encoded hash values?

SHA2 was published in 2001.  It suffers from the same Merkle-Damgard
limitations that SHA1 has.  The SHA-3 algorithm was published in 2012.
There are incremental security results for SHA2:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2

If truly you are not relying on cryptographic properties, how about
using a non-cryptographic hash function like xxHash instead?

However I think that at some levels, your hash values will be used in
ways that have security implications, so using a modern and strong hash
algorithm seems prudent.  I would not classify SHA2 as modern, it is
over 25 years old.

/Simon
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