RFC 0002 — Canonical JSON v1

Goal

Make signatures and digests stable across languages.

Canonicalization id

json.c14n.v1

Rules

• UTF‑8 bytes only
• Objects: keys sorted lexicographically by Unicode codepoint
• No insignificant whitespace
• Numbers:
  • Disallow NaN and Infinity
  • Disallow floats unless explicitly permitted by schema
  • Prefer integers or decimal strings
• Arrays: order preserved
• No duplicate keys
• All digests represented as strings: sha256: + 64 lowercase hex

Engineering note

Canonicalization is part of the security boundary:

• Every signature is computed over canonical JSON bytes.
• Every digest field in contracts is defined in terms of canonical JSON bytes or raw bytes, explicitly.