Episode 3: BLAKE3, A Parallelizable Hash Function Using Merkle Trees!

Ever since its introduction in 2012, the BLAKE hash function has been reputed for achieving performance matching and even exceeding MD5 while still maintaining a high security margin.

While the original BLAKE did make it as a finalist to the NIST SHA3 competition, Keccak was ultimately selected. But this hasn’t discouraged the BLAKE team, who in January of this year, published BLAKE3, promising to be even faster than BLAKE2 thanks to a highly parallelizable design and fewer rounds.

But wait, what exactly is a parallelizable hash function? Isn't a lower round number risky? And heck, how do you even design a hash function?! Joining me today are two of the four BLAKE3 authors: Jack O’Connor and Jean-Philippe Aumasson, to discuss these questions and more.

Links and papers discussed in the show:

BLAKE3

Too Much Crypto

PoSH: Proof of Staked Hardware Consensus

Online Authenticated-Encryption and its Nonce-Reuse Misuse-Resistance

Music composed by Toby Fox and performed by Sean Schafianski.

Special Guests: Jack O'Connor and Jean-Philippe Aumasson.

Sponsored By:

• NSU: This episode of Cryptography FM is sponsored by NSUCRYPTO, the International Olympiad in Cryptography. NSUCrypto is the unique cryptographic Olympiad containing scientific mathematical problems for professionals, school and university students from any country. Its aim is to involve young researchers in solving curious and tough scientific problems of modern cryptography. From the very beginning, the concept of the Olympiad was not to focus on solving olympic tasks but on including unsolved research problems at the intersection of mathematics and cryptography. There were more than 1900 participants from 52 countries in the first six Olympiads!

  The first round of the 2020 NSUCRYPTO Olympiad will be held this week on October 18th, so head over to the NSUCrypto website at https://nsucrypto.nsu.ru today to sign up and try your hand against interesting and fun cryptography puzzles!