BLAKE2 Claims Faster Hashing Than SHA-3, SHA-2 and MD5 134
hypnosec writes "BLAKE2 has been recently announced as a new alternative to the existing cryptographic hash algorithms MD5 and SHA-2/3. With applicability in cloud storage, software distribution, host-based intrusion detection, digital forensics and revision control tools, BLAKE2 performs a lot faster than the MD5 algorithm on Intel 32- and 64-bit systems. The developers of BLAKE2 insist that even though the algorithm is faster, there are no loose ends when it comes to security. BLAKE2 is an optimized version of the then SHA-3 finalist BLAKE."
Re:links to NIST (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah... I was under the impression that more hashes faster was a bad thing. That is something for which crackers tune their code, but they didn't explicitly mention password storage. Perhaps it is targeted more for checksum like usage.
Re:Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Before "too fast = bad" (Score:4, Insightful)
The issue is not so much how small and fast you can make one instance of the algorithm, but rather, how it scales from small/slow to fast/big. An algorithm like a hash or block cipher gets baked into many silicon contexts, like instructions, or memory datapaths, or offload processors, or IO datapaths. The size/speed/power requirements of these different contexts varies.
Keccek is harder to divide down into smaller execution chunks in hardware than skein.
Skein has an add-xor core operation that is repeated width-wise and depth-wise. So you can easily scale it in width, depth and pipeline depth in order to meet the needs of the situation.