BLAKE (hash function)

BLAKE

General
Designers	Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Luca Henzen, Willi Meier, Raphael C.-W. Phan
Certification	SHA-3 finalist
Detail
Digest sizes	224, 256, 384 or 512 bits
Rounds	14 or 16
Speed	8.4 cpb on Core 2 for BLAKE-256; 7.8 cpb for BLAKE-512

BLAKE is a cryptographic hash function submitted to the NIST hash function competition by Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Luca Henzen, Willi Meier, and Raphael C.-W. Phan. It is based on Dan Bernstein's ChaCha stream cipher, but a permuted copy of the input block, XORed with some round constants, is added before each ChaCha round. BLAKE was chosen as one of the five finalists of the competition.

Like SHA-2, there are two variants differing in the word size. ChaCha operates on a 4×4 array of words. BLAKE repeatedly combines an 8-word hash value with 16 message words, truncating the ChaCha result to obtain the next hash value. BLAKE-256 uses 32-bit words, while BLAKE-512 uses 64-bit words.

Algorithm

Like SHA-2, BLAKE comes in two variants: one that uses 32-bit words, used for computing hashes up to 256 bits long, and one that uses 64-bit words, used for computing hashes up to 512 bits long. The core block transformation combines 16 words of input with 16 working variables, but only 8 words (256 or 512 bits) are preserved between blocks.

It uses a table of 16 constant words (the leading 512 or 1024 bits of the fractional part of π), and a table of 10 16-element permutations:

σ[0] =  0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15
σ[1] = 14 10  4  8  9 15 13  6  1 12  0  2 11  7  5  3
σ[2] = 11  8 12  0  5  2 15 13 10 14  3  6  7  1  9  4
σ[3] =  7  9  3  1 13 12 11 14  2  6  5 10  4  0 15  8
σ[4] =  9  0  5  7  2  4 10 15 14  1 11 12  6  8  3 13
σ[5] =  2 12  6 10  0 11  8  3  4 13  7  5 15 14  1  9
σ[6] = 12  5  1 15 14 13  4 10  0  7  6  3  9  2  8 11
σ[7] = 13 11  7 14 12  1  3  9  5  0 15  4  8  6  2 10
σ[8] =  6 15 14  9 11  3  0  8 12  2 13  7  1  4 10  5
σ[9] = 10  2  8  4  7  6  1  5 15 11  9 14  3 12 13  0

The core operation, equivalent to ChaCha's quarter round, operates on a 4-word column or diagonal combines with 2 words of message m[] and two constant words c[]. It is performed 8 times per full round:

j ← σ[r%10][2×i]            // Index computations
k ← σ[r%10][2×i+1]
a ← a + b + (m[j] ⊕ c[k])   // Step 1 (with input)
d ← (d ⊕ a) >>> 16
c ← c + d                   // Step 2 (no input)
b ← (b ⊕ c) >>> 12
a ← a + b + (m[k] ⊕ c[j])   // Step 3 (with input)
d ← (d ⊕ a) >>> 8
c ← c + d                   // Step 4 (no input)
b ← (b ⊕ c) >>> 7

In the above, r is the round number (0–13), and i varies from 0 to 7.

The differences from the ChaCha quarter-round function are:

• The addition of the message words has been added.
• The rotation directions have been reversed.

The 64-bit version (which does not exist in ChaCha) is identical, but the rotation amounts are 32, 25, 16 and 11, respectively, and the number of rounds is increased to 16.

Tweaks

Throughout the NIST hash function competition, entrants are permitted to "tweak" their algorithms to address issues that are discovered. Changes that have been made to BLAKE are:

• The number of rounds was increased from 10/14 to 14/16. This is to be more conservative about security while still being fast.

BLAKE hashes

BLAKE-512("")
 = A8CFBBD73726062DF0C6864DDA65DEFE58EF0CC52A5625090FA17601E1EECD1B
   628E94F396AE402A00ACC9EAB77B4D4C2E852AAAA25A636D80AF3FC7913EF5B8

BLAKE-512("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog")
 = 1F7E26F63B6AD25A0896FD978FD050A1766391D2FD0471A77AFB975E5034B7AD
   2D9CCF8DFB47ABBBE656E1B82FBC634BA42CE186E8DC5E1CE09A885D41F43451

BLAKE2

An improved version of BLAKE was announced in December 21, 2012, called BLAKE2. It created by Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Samuel Neves, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, and Christian Winnerlein with the goal to replace widely used, but broken MD5 and SHA-1 algorithms, with applicability in cloud storage, software distribution, host-based intrusion detection, digital forensics, and revision control tools.

BLAKE2 removes addition of constants to message words from BLAKE round function, changes two rotation constants, simplifies padding, adds parameter block that is XOR'ed with initialization vectors, and reduces the number of rounds from 16 to 12 for BLAKE2b (successor of BLAKE-512), and from 14 to 10 for BLAKE2s (successor of BLAKE-256).

BLAKE2 supports keying, salting, personalization, and hash tree modes, and can output digests from 1 up to 64 bytes for BLAKE2b or up to 32 bytes for BLAKE2s. There are also parallel versions designed for increased performance on multi-core processors.

External links

• The BLAKE web site
• A VHDL source codes developed in the Cryptographic Engineering Research Group (CERG) at George Mason University