BLAKE2
What is BLAKE2?
BLAKE2A fast, modern cryptographic hash function specified in RFC 7693, offering security comparable to SHA-3 with significantly higher performance in software.
BLAKE2 is a hash function family designed by Aumasson, Neves, Wilcox-O'Hearn and Winnerlein in 2012 as a refinement of the SHA-3 finalist BLAKE. It comes in two main variants: BLAKE2b (up to 64-byte digests, optimised for 64-bit platforms) and BLAKE2s (up to 32-byte digests for 32-bit platforms), with parallel versions BLAKE2bp/BLAKE2sp. BLAKE2 is built on the HAIFA construction over a ChaCha-style permutation and natively supports keyed hashing, salting, personalisation and tree hashing without a separate HMAC wrapper. It is unbroken, faster than SHA-2/SHA-3 in software, and is used in Argon2, libsodium, WireGuard handshake hashing and Zcash.
● Examples
- 01
Argon2 uses BLAKE2b internally as its compression primitive.
- 02
WireGuard hashes the handshake transcript with BLAKE2s.
● Frequently asked questions
What is BLAKE2?
A fast, modern cryptographic hash function specified in RFC 7693, offering security comparable to SHA-3 with significantly higher performance in software. It belongs to the Cryptography category of cybersecurity.
What does BLAKE2 mean?
A fast, modern cryptographic hash function specified in RFC 7693, offering security comparable to SHA-3 with significantly higher performance in software.
How do you defend against BLAKE2?
Defences for BLAKE2 typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.
What are other names for BLAKE2?
Common alternative names include: BLAKE2b, BLAKE2s, RFC 7693.