BLAKE2 is a high-performance alternative to those outdated hashing algorithms that have been around since the days of dial-up internet (which, let’s be real, was a long time ago). It offers better security and faster speeds than its predecessors, making it an excellent choice for anyone who needs to hash data quickly and efficiently.

So why should you care about BLAKE2? Well, first of all, it’s more secure than MD5 and SHA-1 because it provides immunity to length extension attacks (which means that attackers can’t add extra data to your hashed message without being detected) and is indifferentiable from a random oracle. That’s fancy crypto talk for “it’s really hard to break.”

But what about speed? BLAKE2 is faster than MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, and even SHA-3 on both x86-64 and ARM architectures! And that’s not just a small improvement we’re talking up to twice as fast for some operations.

So how does BLAKE2 work? Well, it simplifies the padding process from its predecessor (BLAKE) by removing addition of constants to message words and changing two rotation constants. It also adds a parameter block that is XOR’ed with initialization vectors, which reduces the number of rounds for both BLAKE2b (successor of BLAKE-512) and BLAKE2s (successor of BLAKE-256).

But don’t just take our word for it check out this reference implementation in C programming language that you can find in Appendix C of the official documentation. And if you want to test your implementation, there’s a more exhaustive Test Module contained in Appendix E.

So what are you waiting for? Give BLAKE2 a try and see how it compares to MD5 and SHA-1! Your data will thank you.