What Do 12 Kangaroos Have to Do With Cybersecurity?

It’s one of the fastest and secure cryptographic hashing methods on the planet

The problem with competitions is that the winner will often take all until the next competition. Those competing could thus get better than the winner, but it is often too late. In cybersecurity, one of the greatest competitions is run by NIST and aims to define a standard for cryptography. It happened with AES, and where the Rijndael method was crowned champion.

And, so, NIST created a competition for SHA-3, and it was Keccak that was crowned the champion. Since then, SHA-3 has received good adoption levels, but you’ll also see BLAKE2 — one of the finalists — being used in many applications. Overall, Keccak won because it was fast, and where BLAKE2 was submitted too late to compete against it. Since then, many have seen BLAKE2 as the better alternative for speed of operation [here] As we see, BLAKE2 (BLAKE2b — the 64-bit version — and BLAKE2s) performs much better than SHA3 implementations:

BLAKE2b then improved its speed by reducing the number of rounds from 16 to 12 and where BLAKE2s went from 14 to 10…