Possible breaking change to decentralized-identity/did-jwt due to Base58 & Base64 Matcher issue

There is an issue with the did-jwt library that may need a breaking change
to fix. See (https://github.com/decentralized-identity/did-jwt/issues/222)
and/or Consider this exmaple:

A 64 character, 32 bit hex string representing a private key is written as:
040f1dbf0a2ca86875447a7c010b0fc6d39d76859c458fbe8f2bf775a40ad74a .

In Base58 these bits take 43 characters:
Gqzym8nfnxR5ZYZ3wZo8rvTwKTqGn5cJsbHnEhUZDPo.

This is a problem for the existing base58Matcher

const base58Matcher =
/^([1-9A-HJ-NP-Za-km-z]{44}|[1-9A-HJ-NP-Za-km-z]{88})$/

A possible solution would be to rewrite this matcher to include 43
character strings:

const base58Matcher =
/^([1-9A-HJ-NP-Za-km-z]{43,44}|[1-9A-HJ-NP-Za-km-z]{86,88})$/

However, this is a problem as the base64 matcher considers the same 43
character length, with a similar alphabet:

const base64Matcher =
/^([0-9a-zA-Z=\-_+/]{43}|[0-9a-zA-Z=\-_+/]{86})(={0,2})$/

Here are the alphabets for Base64 and Base58::

Base64 Alphabet::

0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz+/=

Source: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4648#section-4

Base58 Alphabet::

123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz

Source: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-msporny-base58-01


-Brent Shambaugh

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Received on Tuesday, 29 March 2022 21:48:42 UTC