BLAKE2 Hash and MAC Function

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Are you tired of using boring old SHA-1 for your hash functions?

BLAKE2 is a cryptographic hash function that was designed by Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Samuel Neves, Zooko Wilcox-OHearn, and Christian Winnerlein in 2013. It’s an alternative to SHA-1, SHA-2, and MD5, which are all outdated and have been shown to be vulnerable to attacks.

So what makes BLAKE2 so special? Well, for starters, it’s faster than its predecessors. In fact, it can hash data up to 3x faster than SHA-1 on average! And that’s not all it also has a smaller memory footprint and is more secure against side-channel attacks.

But enough about the technical details (yawn), how you actually use BLAKE2 in your code. Here are some examples:

1. Installing BLAKE2 on Ubuntu using apt-get:

// Update the package list and install the libblake2-dev package using apt-get
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libblake2-dev

2. Using the `blake2s` command to hash a file:

# Using the `blake2s` command to hash a file with 8 parallel jobs and printing the first output using awk
blake2s -j 8 <filename> | awk '{print $1}'

3. Implementing BLAKE2 in Python using the `cryptography` library:

# Importing the Blake2b function from the cryptography library
from cryptography.hazh import Blake2b

# Initializing the hasher object with a digest size of 512 bits
hasher = Blake2b(digest_size=512)

# Updating the hasher with the data to be hashed
hasher.update(data)

# Finalizing the hashing process and storing the result in the 'result' variable
result = hasher.finalize()

# Printing the hexadecimal representation of the hashed data
print(result.hex())

4. Using BLAKE2 in Go:

// This script uses the BLAKE2b cryptographic hash function in Go to generate a 512-bit hash of a file.

package main // Declares the package name, which is required for all Go scripts.

import (
    "crypto/blake2b" // Imports the blake2b package, which contains the necessary functions for generating a BLAKE2b hash.
    "fmt" // Imports the fmt package, which allows for printing to the console.
    "io/ioutil" // Imports the ioutil package, which provides functions for reading and writing files.
)

func main() {
    data, err := ioutil.ReadFile("filename") // Reads the contents of the file "filename" and stores it in the variable "data".
    if err != nil { // Checks if there was an error while reading the file.
        panic(err) // If there was an error, the program will panic and stop execution.
    }

    hash := blake2b.Sum512([]byte(data)) // Generates a 512-bit hash of the file contents and stores it in the variable "hash".
    fmt.Println(hash) // Prints the hash to the console.
}

Now that you know how to use BLAKE2, why it’s so much better than SHA-1 and its cousins. First of all, SHA-1 has a fixed output size (160 bits), which means that if you need a different output size for your hash function, you have to run the algorithm multiple times or use a workaround like truncating the result. BLAKE2, on the other hand, allows you to specify any desired output size between 8 and 512 bytes (64-512 bits).

Secondly, SHA-1 has been shown to be vulnerable to collision attacks, which means that two different inputs can produce the same hash value. This is a major security concern because it allows an attacker to forge digital signatures or tamper with data without being detected. BLAKE2, on the other hand, provides much stronger resistance against collision and preimage attacks (which allow an attacker to find a specific input that produces a given hash value).

Finally, SHA-1 is vulnerable to side-channel attacks, which exploit information leaked during the execution of the algorithm. For example, an attacker can measure the power consumption or electromagnetic radiation emitted by a device while it’s running SHA-1 and use that information to recover the input data. BLAKE2 has been designed with countermeasures against side-channel attacks, making it much more secure in practice than SHA-1.

Give it a try !

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