in reference to using a salt for create hmac digests, is there a difference between using an array of 16 bytes of random data or taking 16 bytes of data, hex encoding it to a string, then turning that string into bytes directly, and then using those 32 bytes? #asknostr #fml

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No except the 2nd one wastes CPU cycles

the hashes i get are different though.

yes because you are feeding a hex encoded version to hmac

but it does not improve security

ok that's what I thought. so if there, hypothetically, was an implementation doing that, it probably was by mistake then?