Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Now Meet Blake 2 … In Hardware

Ssh! Don’t tell NIST, but there’s (possibly) a better hashing method than SHA-256 (SHA-2 standard). And, it’s Blake 2.

So, while Blake 2 has always been faster than most of the existing cryptographic hashes with software methods, a new hardware build has been created that will allow Blake 2s to be implemented in hardware on 32-bit processors:

GitHub - secworks/blake2s: Verilog implementation of the 32-bit version of the Blake2 hash function

This build has been created with Verilog and which is a standard hardware description language. Overall, Blake 2b is focused on 64-bit architectures, while Blake 2s focuses on 32-bit ones. The Verilog design implements the Blake 2 methodology defined in RFC 7693 [here] and which was authored by Ed Saarinen and JP Aumasson:

The implementation shows that it uses around the same resources, but is around twice as fast as SHA-256.

Keyed hashing (HMAC) with Blake2