Are you tired of using boring old SHA-1 for all your hash needs? These two hash functions are a game changer in the world of cryptography.

To start, what makes them so special. Unlike SHA-1 (which is now considered outdated due to its vulnerabilities), BLAKE2b and BLAKE2s use a sponge construction that allows for variable output sizes. This means you can choose the exact length of your hash digest, whether it’s 32 bytes or 64 bytes or anything in between!

Both functions also support keyed mode (which is like HMAC but faster and simpler), salted hashing, personalization, and tree hashing. This makes them incredibly versatile for a variety of use cases.

Now Let’s roll with the technical details. BLAKE2b is optimized for 64-bit platforms and produces digests between 1 byte and 64 bytes in length. It uses a sponge construction with a fixed capacity of 512 bits (or 64 bytes) and a variable output size. The function takes an optional key, salt, personalization data, fanout value, depth value, leaf size, node offset, node depth, inner size, last_node flag, and usedforsecurity flag as arguments.

BLAKE2s is optimized for 8- to 32-bit platforms and produces digests between 1 byte and 32 bytes in length. It uses a sponge construction with a fixed capacity of 512 bits (or 64 bytes) and a variable output size, just like BLAKE2b. However, it’s designed to be faster on smaller platforms due to its optimized implementation for those architectures.

So how do you use these functions in Python? It’s actually pretty simple! Here’s an example:

# Import the hashlib library to access the BLAKE2b hashing function
import hashlib

# Create a new BLAKE2b object with a fixed capacity of 512 bits and a variable output size
# The capacity is set to 512 bits (64 bytes) and the output size can be adjusted as needed
hash_obj = hashlib.blake2b(digest_size=32, person=b"Blake2b")

# Update the hash object with some data to be hashed
# The data to be hashed is converted to bytes using the "b" prefix
hash_obj.update(b"Hello, world!")

# Get the final digest as a bytes object
# The digest is the final output of the hashing process
digest = hash_obj.digest()

# Print the digest to see the result
print(digest)

And that’s it! You can customize the settings by passing in arguments when creating the hash object (as we mentioned earlier). But for most use cases, the default settings should be fine.