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
(https://github.com/BLAKE3-team/BLAKE3-specs/blob/master/blake3.pdf)
* Too Much Crypto (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1492) * PoSH: Proof
of Staked Hardware Consensus (https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1176) *
Online Authenticated-Encryption and its Nonce-Reuse
Misuse-Resistance
(https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/oae.pdf) Music composed
by Toby Fox and performed by Sean Schafianski
(https://seanschafianski.bandcamp.com/). Special Guests: Jack
O'Connor and Jean-Philippe Aumasson.