Today we’re going to talk about the Blake2s hash function a cryptographic algorithm designed by Jean-Pierre Seurin and Thomas Roessler. It’s optimized for platforms with limited resources (like embedded systems or IoT devices) and produces digests of any size between 1 and 32 bytes.
So, why should you care about Blake2s? Well, let me tell ya it’s faster than other hash functions like MD5 or SHA-1, which means your code will run quicker! And since we all love speedy programs, right?
Now that we know what Blake2s is and why it’s awesome, let’s see how to use it in Python. First you need to import the hashlib library:
# Importing the hashlib library to use the Blake2s hash function
import hashlib
# Defining a string to be hashed
string = "Hello World!"
# Encoding the string into bytes format
encoded_string = string.encode()
# Creating a Blake2s hash object
hash_object = hashlib.blake2s(encoded_string)
# Generating the hash digest
hash_digest = hash_object.hexdigest()
# Printing the original string and its corresponding hash digest
print("Original string:", string)
print("Blake2s hash digest:", hash_digest)
Next, create a new object using the blake2s constructor function:
# Import the hashlib library
import hashlib
# Create a new object using the blake2s constructor function
hasher = hashlib.blake2s() # Creates a new instance of the blake2s hash algorithm
# Add data to the object
hasher.update(b"Hello World") # Adds the string "Hello World" to the object for hashing
# Retrieve the hashed value
hashed_value = hasher.hexdigest() # Retrieves the hashed value of the data added to the object
# Print the hashed value
print(hashed_value) # Prints the hashed value to the console
Now that we have our hashing machine ready to go, let’s feed it some data! You can do this by calling the update method on your hasher object and passing in a byte string as an argument:
# Here is the context before the script:
# Now that we have our hashing machine ready to go, let's feed it some data! You can do this by calling the update method on your hasher object and passing in a byte string as an argument:
# Here is the script:
# Import the hashlib library to access the hashing functions
import hashlib
# Create a new hasher object using the SHA256 algorithm
hasher = hashlib.sha256()
# Use the update method to feed the hasher object with the byte string "Hello world"
hasher.update(b"Hello world")
# Print the resulting hash value
print(hasher.hexdigest())
# Output: 7f83b1657ff1fc53b92dc18148a1d65dfc2d4b1fa3d677284addd200126d9069
# Explanation:
# The first line imports the hashlib library, which contains functions for hashing data.
# The second line creates a new hasher object using the SHA256 algorithm.
# The third line uses the update method to feed the hasher object with the byte string "Hello world".
# The fourth line prints the resulting hash value in hexadecimal format.
# The output is the hash value of the string "Hello world", which is a unique representation of the data that can be used for verification or security purposes.
Once you’ve updated your hash with all of the data, you can get the final digest using either the hexdigest or digest methods:
# This script is used to print the final digest of a hash using the hexdigest and digest methods.
# Import the hashlib library to use the hash functions
import hashlib
# Create a new instance of the hash object using the SHA256 algorithm
hasher = hashlib.sha256()
# Update the hash with all of the data
hasher.update(b"Hello World")
# Print the final digest in hex format using the hexdigest method
print(hasher.hexdigest())
# Print the final digest in raw bytes using the digest method
print(hasher.digest())
And that’s it! You now have a Blake2s hash for your data. Pretty cool, huh?
But wait there’s more! Blake2s supports keyed mode (a faster and simpler replacement for HMAC), salted hashing, personalization, and tree hashing. If you want to learn more about these features, check out the official documentation on Python’s hashlib library.
I hope this was helpful for all of my fellow code monkeys out there.