I had a similar take on the article. Also, hashing JSON is something which looks somewhat dangerous.

I guess one aspect which was a bit implicit in the article is that if the thing one is hashing has a limited number of states, then a preimage for ordering more apples than intended could be found (in addition to a lack of authentication data). That's where adding more information would also be helpful, and using DER would not fix that.

EDIT: I realised that I made a mistake. A preimage can not be found when a strong hash function is used. What can, however, happen is that differently structured data can have a nonunique mapping to a byte vector which can be exploited.

> Also, hashing JSON is something which looks somewhat dangerous.

Hashing JSON is an idea that gives me the creeps because two identical bits of JSON can have different hashes, which sounds like a much bigger problem to me than two different bits of JSON having the same hash.

    {"k1":40,"k2":25}

and

    {"k2":25,"k1":40}

are the same object; no matter what you're using the hash for, they should have the same hash.

Yes, sadly finding people who are willing to admit to knowing ASN.1 and who are willing to work on ASN.1 isn't so easy