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sha2throwaway

Re:The BitTorrent Protocol Specification v2 on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @02:14AM (#14954924)
Actually you do get some added security, because it prevents the length extension attacks sha-2 and related hash functions have thanks to the Merkle-Damgard construction [0]. Specifically, by truncating the hash, the output no longer contains enough state to perform the attack.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_extension_attack