The following question is more complex than it may first seem. 

Assume that I&#39;ve got an arbitrary JSON object, one that may contain any amount of data including other nested JSON objects.  What I want is a cryptographic hash/digest of the JSON data, without regard to the actual JSON formatting itself (eg: ignoring newlines and spacing differences between the JSON tokens).

The last part is a requirement, as the JSON will be generated/read by a variety of (de)serializers on a number of different platforms.  I know of at least one JSON library for Java that completely removes formatting when reading data during deserialization.  As such it will break the hash.

The arbitrary data clause above also complicates things, as it prevents me from taking known fields in a given order and concatenating them prior to hasing (think roughly how Java&#39;s non-cryptographic hashCode() method works).

Lastly, hashing the entire JSON String as a chunk of bytes (prior to deserialization) is not desirable either, since there are fields in the JSON that should be ignored when computing the hash.

I&#39;m not sure there is a good solution to this problem, but I welcome any approaches or thoughts =)

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How to cryptographically hash a JSON object?