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Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

I'm a newb at this, but how does this compare to SHA3/blake2 in term of applications? Is it more/less/same secure?

Or better: how can I educate myself better on the proper usage of certain hashing functions?

This is a hash function (as used in hash tables/Bloom filters and so forth), but it is not a cryptographic hash function. It is designed to be very fast for things like table lookups, but it is not designed to be strongly resistant to preimages, second-preimages, or collisions. Don't use it for security-relevant purposes.

I think BLAKE2 is probably the fastest and best cryptographic hash function you're likely to see for the foreseeable future?

Thanks, that's basically what I was looking for. I have apps that are bottlenecked by blake2, so finding a faster cryptographic hash function would be pretty interesting to me.

If BLAKE2 (I assume you're using blake2b) is your bottleneck, perhaps you should consider the blake2bp (four way parallelism) or the blake2sp (eight way parallelism) variants. If even those are too slow for you (lots of continuous data and you have multiple cores available), then you might be able to try using tree hashing on top of one of the mentioned BLAKE2 variants.

I'm curious though, what are you working on that saturates ~1 GiB/s/core?

A content addressable distributed cache, where the disk + network IO capacity is ~40Gb/s. A bit similar to IPFS.

Interesting. How big do you need the hashes to be?

This isn't a cryptographic hash function. It's meant for use in things like hash tables where speed is an important factor.

Practice, practice, practice :)

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