HighwayHash
HighwayHash is a family of fast pseudorandom functions developed by Jyrki Alakuijala and Jan Wassenberg. The stated design goals are high-throughput mixing and low-cost finalization. An open-source (Apache 2 license) reference implementation was published in March 2016.
Overview
HighwayHash computes 64-bit (or up to 256 bit) digests from a 256-bit secret key and a variable-length input. It processes 32 bytes at a time using AVX-2 SIMD instructions. For 1 KiB blocks, the reported[1] throughput is 11.3 GB/s (single-core), or 0.3 cycles per byte. This is about 10 times as fast as existing secure hashes in the ECRYPT hash benchmark.[2]
The mixing multiplies 32-bit halves of the input with internal state, yielding a 64-bit result which is permuted and added to the state. The finalization involves four mixing rounds.
Applications
Suggested applications include hash tables immune to hash-flooding attacks, and pseudorandom number generation.
Naming
The name HighwayHash is similar to other hashes developed within Google: CityHash and FarmHash.
See also
References
- ↑ Jyrki Alakuijala, Jan Wassenberg (2016-03-01). "HighwayHash description".
- ↑ "eBACS: ECRYPT Benchmarking of Cryptographic Systems".
External links
- Jyrki Alakuijala, Jan Wassenberg. "HighwayHash on Github: fast mixing".
- "Google Open Source Blog (release announcement)".