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Choosing a hash function for 2030 and beyond: SHA-2 vs. SHA-3 vs. BLAKE3

23 points by unsolved73

by robobully

0 subcomment

A month ago, the team behind the SHA-3 has published an RFC for TurboSHAKE and KangarooTwelve: secure hash functions that employ the same primitive as SHA-3, but with reduced number of rounds to make it faster. K12 is basically a tree-based hash over TurboSHAKE.
https://keccak.team/2025/rfc9861.html

by Octoth0rpe

3 subcomments

Could someone explain the differences between these two points? They seem identical to me.
> [The hash function] also should be second-preimage resistant: For a given message M1, it must be virtually impossible to find a second message M2 where M1 != M2 that produces the same hash hash(M1) == hash(M2).
> These functions should be also collision resistant: it must be virtually impossible to find two messages M1 and M2 where hash(M1) == hash(M2).

by amluto

2 subcomments

> We will evaluate these functions on 3 points:
I’m disappointed that they didn’t discuss my favorite feature of BLAKE3: it’s a tree hash. If you have a file and the BLAKE3 hash of that file, you can generate a proof that a portion of the file is correct. And you can take a file, split it into pieces (of known length and offset), hash them as you receive them, and then assemble them into the full file and efficiently calculate the full file’s hash. The other options cannot do this, although you could certainly build this on top of them.
Imagine how much better S3 would be if it used BLAKE3 instead of MD5. (Hah, S3 and its competitors don’t even manage to fully support MD5 for multipart uploads, although they could support BLAKE3 very well with multipart uploads!)

by scatbot

2 subcomments

Honestly, I'm skeptical of the whole Keccak-derived ecosystem. The reduced-rounds variants like K12 and TurboShake are trading a conservative security margin for speed, which kinda feels odd when compared to BLAKE3. Meanwhile, BLAKE3 covers everything for real-world use. It's super fast on any input, fully parallelizable and has a built-in key mode. The only real advantage Keccak-based functions seem to have is standardization and potential hardware acceleration.
If you care about speed, security and simplicity, and you don't care about NIST compliance, BLAKE3 is hard to beat.

by jswelker

0 subcomment