What’s the Fastest Crypto Hash Around, and Can I Generate An Encryption Key and a MAC?
So what’s the fastest cryptographic hashing method? Well, there’s one method that wipes the floor with every other cryptographic hashing method, and it’s BLAKE3. In fact, BLAKE 3 can be more than 30 times faster than SHA-256:
So let’s do a bit of secure coding of Blake hashes such Rust.
Hashing with BLAKE3
For SHA-3, NIST published the new standard, based on Keccak, on 5 August 2015, and which beat off competition from BLAKE (Aumasson et al.), Grøstl (Knudsen et al), JH (Hongjun Wu), and Skein (Schneier et al.). After two rounds, the final round evaluated of security, performance and hardware space. Since then there have been two new versions of BLAKE: BLAKE2b and BLAKE3. BLAKE3 basically wipes the floor its previous version (BLAKE2b), and which was already faster than SHA-3. It gives the equivalent of 128 bits of security. At its core is the Bao tree mode and the original BLAKE2 method, and it was been created by Jack O’Connor, Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Samuel Neves, and Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn.
