[openssl-dev] [openssl.org #3897] request: add BLAKE2 hash function (let's kill md5sum!)

[Zooko Wilcox-OHearn]

(re-sent because I wasn't subscribed to openssl-dev first time and it
bounced from there but went through to rt at .)


Dear Rich Salz et al.:

"b" is for "big" — fits well with 64-bit architectures, and "s" is for
"small" — fits well with 32-bit architectures.

"p" is for "parallel" — has several parallel threads that each compute
the hash of a different subset of the input data, and then those
hashes get hashed together to result in the final output. Therefore it
isn't just an internal implementation different — blake2sp generates
different hash values than blake2s does, and blake2b and blake2bp are
all different — each of the four would produce a  different value.

In practice the parallel mode works nicely on modern systems. Hashing
a 1 GiB file on my Intel Core i5 laptop:

md5: 2.1s
sha256: 5.7s
blake2b: 1.8s
blake2sp: 1.1s

(from https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/coreutils/14d96872a0e9d1b3 )

Regards,

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn

Founder, CEO, and Customer Support Rep
https://LeastAuthority.com — Freedom matters.