BLAKE2 — fast secure hashing🔒 SSL Verified

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"A: We have no proof that BLAKE2 is as secure as we claim, but there are good reasons to believe it: BLAKE2 relies on (essentially) the same core algorithm as BLAKE, which has been intensively analyzed since 2008 within the SHA-3 competition, and which was one of the 5 finalists. NIST's final report writes that BLAKE has a "very large security margin", and that the the cryptanalysis performed on it has "a great deal of depth". The best academic attack on BLAKE (and BLAKE2) works on a reduced version with 2.5 rounds, whereas BLAKE2b does 12 rounds, and BLAKE2s does 10 rounds. But even this attack is not practical: it only shows for example that with 2.5 rounds, the preimage security of BLAKE2b is downgraded from 512 bits to 481 bits, or that the collision security of BLAKE2s is downgraded from 128 bits to 112 bits (which is similar to the security of 2048-bit RSA)."

"A: BLAKE2 is fast in software because it exploits features of modern CPUs, namely instruction-level parallelism, SIMD instruction set extensions, and multiple cores. BLAKE2 also benefits from the optimization work performed during the SHA-3 competition (see for example this paper by two of the designers of BLAKE2)."

"A: You want your hash function to be fast if you are using it to compute the secure hash of a large amount of data, such as in distributed filesystems (e.g. Tahoe-LAFS), cloud storage systems (e.g. OpenStack Swift), intrusion detection systems (e.g. Samhain), integrity-checking local filesystems (e.g. ZFS), peer-to-peer file-sharing tools (e.g. BitTorrent), or version control systems (e.g. git). You only want your hash function to be slow if you're using it to "stretch" user-supplied passwords, in which case see the next question."

"A: You shouldn't use *any* general-purpose hash function for user passwords, not BLAKE2, and not MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, or SHA-3. Instead you should use a password hashing function such as the PHC winner Argon2 with appropriate time and memory cost parameters, to mitigate the risk of bruteforce attacks—Argon2's core uses a variant of BLAKE2's permutation."

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