Multihash is a protocol for differentiating outputs from various well-established cryptographic hash functions, addressing size + encoding considerations.
It is useful to write applications that future-proof their use of hashes, and allow multiple hash functions to coexist. See jbenet/random-ideas#1 for a longer discussion.
Outputs of <encoding>.encode(multihash(<digest>, <function>)):
# sha1 - 0x11
11140beec7b5ea3f0fdbc95d0dd47f3c5bc275da8a33 # sha1 in hex
24a0qvp7pqn3y3yvt5egvn3z7hdw4xeuh8tg # sha1 in base32
5dqx43zNtUUbPj97vJhpHyUUPyrmXG # sha1 in base58
ERQL7se16j8P28ldDdR/PFvCddqKMw== # sha1 in base64
# sha2-256 0x12
12202c26b46b68ffc68ff99b453c1d30413413422d706483bfa0f98a5e886266e7ae # sha2-256 in hex
28g2r9nmddmfzhmfz6dmaf0x610k84u25nr690xzm3wrmqm8c9kefbg # sha256 in base32
QmRJzsvyCQyizr73Gmms8ZRtvNxmgqumxc2KUp71dfEmoj # sha256 in base58
EiAsJrRraP/Gj/mbRTwdMEE0E0ItcGSDv6D5il6IYmbnrg== # sha256 in base64
<1-byte hash function code><1-byte digest size in bytes><hash function output>
Binary example (only 4 bytes for simplicity):
fn code dig size hash digest
-------- -------- ------------------------------------
00010001 00000100 101101100 11111000 01011100 10110101
sha1 4 bytes 4 byte sha1 digest
Why have digest size as a separate byte?
Because you end up with a function code really meaning "function-and-digest-size-code". Makes using custom digest sizes annoying, and is less flexible.
What if we need more?
Let's decide that when we have 128 hash functions or digest sizes.
Why isn't the size first?
Because aesthetically I prefer the code first. You already have to write your stream parsing code to understand that a singe byte already means "a length in bytes more to skip". Reversing these doesn't buy you much.
- go-multihash
- node-multihash
- clj-multihash
- rust-multihash
- haskell-multihash
- python-multihash
- elixir-multihash, elixir-multihashing
- swift-multihash
- ruby-multihash
The current multihash table is here:
code name
0x11 sha1
0x12 sha2-256
0x13 sha2-512
0x14 sha3
0x40 blake2b
0x41 blake2s
# 0x00-0x0f reserved for application specific functions
# 0x10-0x3f reserved for SHA standard functions
Cannot find a good standard on this. Found some different IANA ones:
- https://www.iana.org/assignments/tls-parameters/tls-parameters.xhtml#tls-parameters-18
- http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6920#section-9.4
They disagree. :(
Warning: obviously multihash values bias the first two bytes. Do not expect them to be uniformly distributed. The entropy size is len(multihash) - 2. Skip the first two bytes when using them with bloom filters, etc. Why not _ap_pend instead of _pre_pend? Because when reading a stream of hashes, you can know the length of the hash (from the table).
License: MIT