Why Signed JSON Breaks and How a Canonical Encoding Fixes It

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a bug that shows up in almost every system that signs or hashes structured data. Service A builds a record, serializes it as JSON, hashes it and signs the hash. Service B receives the record, parses it, does some work, serializes it again and checks the signature. It fails. Nobody changed a single field.

What changed was the bytes. Service B’s JSON library wrote the keys in a different order. Or it wrote 1.0 as 1. Or it escaped é as é where A wrote the character itself. All three are valid JSON for the same data. A hash doesn’t care about data, though. It cares about bytes, and there are many ways to write the same JSON.

Why CI Pipelines Redo Work Nobody Changed and How a Command Memoizer Stops It

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Watch a CI log for a week and count the steps that produced exactly the same output as last time. Code generation from schemas that didn’t change. Image resizing for assets nobody touched. Test fixtures rebuilt from the same seed data. A documentation site rendered from the same pages. Each step is a few seconds or a few minutes. On every push, on every branch, on every laptop, it adds up to hours a week of machines doing work they’ve already done.

Explainer on BXM.net

Why Signed JSON Breaks and How a Canonical Encoding Fixes It

Why CI Pipelines Redo Work Nobody Changed and How a Command Memoizer Stops It