BLAKE3 is a cryptographic hash function that is:
- Much faster than MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, SHA-3, and BLAKE2.
- Secure, unlike MD5 and SHA-1. And secure against length extension,
unlike SHA-2. - Highly parallelizable across any number of threads and SIMD lanes,
because it's a Merkle tree on the inside. - Capable of verified streaming and incremental updates, again
because it's a Merkle tree. - A PRF, MAC, KDF, and XOF, as well as a regular hash.
- One algorithm with no variants, which is fast on x86-64 and also
on smaller architectures.
The chart below
is an example benchmark of 16 KiB inputs on a Cascade Lake-SP 8275CL server CPU
from 2019. For more detailed benchmarks, see the
BLAKE3 paper.
BLAKE3 is based on an optimized instance of the established hash
function BLAKE2 and on the original Bao tree
mode.
The specifications and design rationale are available in the BLAKE3
paper.
The default output size is 256 bits. The current version of
Bao implements verified streaming
with BLAKE3.
This repository is the official implementation of BLAKE3. It includes:
-
The
blake3Rust crate, which
includes optimized implementations for SSE2, SSE4.1, AVX2, AVX-512,
and NEON, with automatic runtime CPU feature detection on x86. The
rayonfeature provides multithreading. -
The
b3sumRust crate, which
provides a command line interface. It uses multithreading by default,
making it an order of magnitude faster than e.g.sha256sumon
typical desktop hardware. -
The C implementation, which like the Rust implementation includes
SIMD code and runtime CPU feature detection on x86. Unlike the Rust
implementation, it's not currently multithreaded. See
c/README.md. -
The Rust reference implementation,
which is discussed in Section 5.1 of the BLAKE3
paper.
This implementation is much smaller and simpler than the optimized
ones above. If you want to see how BLAKE3 works, or you're writing a
port that doesn't need multithreading or SIMD optimizations, start
here. Ports of the reference implementation to other languages are
hosted in separate repositories
(C,
Python). -
A set of test
vectors
that covers extended outputs, all three modes, and a variety of input
lengths. -
BLAKE3 was designed by:
- @oconnor663 (Jack O'Connor)
- @sneves (Samuel Neves)
- @veorq (Jean-Philippe Aumasson)
- @zookozcash (Zooko)
The development of BLAKE3 was sponsored by Electric Coin Company.
NOTE: BLAKE3 is not a password hashing algorithm, because it's
designed to be fast, whereas password hashing should not be fast. If you
hash passwords to store the hashes or if you derive keys from passwords,
we recommend Argon2.
Usage
The b3sum utility
The b3sum command line utility prints the BLAKE3 hashes of files or of
standard input. Prebuilt binaries are available for Linux, Windows, and
macOS (requiring the unidentified developer
workaround)
on the releases page.
If you've installed Rust and
Cargo,
you can also build b3sum yourself with:
cargo install b3sum
If rustup didn't configure your PATH for you, you might need to go
looking for the installed binary in e.g. ~/.cargo/bin. You can test
out how fast BLAKE3 is on your machine by creating a big file and
hashing it, for example:
# Create a 1 GB file.
head -c 1000000000 /dev/zero > /tmp/bigfile
# Hash it with SHA-256.
time openssl sha256 /tmp/bigfile
# Hash it with BLAKE3.
time b3sum /tmp/bigfile
The blake3 crate 
To use BLAKE3 from Rust code, add a dependency on the blake3 crate to
your Cargo.toml. Here's an example of hashing some input bytes:
// Hash an input all at once.
let hash1 = blake3::hash(b"foobarbaz");
// Hash an input incrementally.
let mut hasher = blake3::Hasher::new();
hasher.update(b"foo");
hasher.update(b"bar");
hasher.update(b"baz");
let hash2 = hasher.finalize();
assert_eq!(hash1, hash2);
// Extended output. OutputReader also implements Read and Seek.
let mut output = [0; 1000];
let mut output_reader = hasher.finalize_xof();
output_reader.fill(&mut output);
assert_eq!(hash1, output[..32]);
// Print a hash as hex.
println!("{}", hash1);
Besides hash, BLAKE3 provides two other modes, keyed_hash and
derive_key. The keyed_hash mode takes a 256-bit key:
// MAC an input all at once.
let example_key = [42u8; 32];
let mac1 = blake3::keyed_hash(&example_key, b"example input");
// MAC incrementally.
let mut hasher = blake3::Hasher::new_keyed(&example_key);
hasher.update(b"example input");
let mac2 = hasher.finalize();
assert_eq!(mac1, mac2);
The derive_key mode takes a context string and some key material (not a
password). The context string should be hardcoded, globally unique, and
application-specific. A good default format for the context string is
"[application] [commit timestamp] [purpose]":
// Derive a couple of subkeys for different purposes.
const EMAIL_CONTEXT: &str = "BLAKE3 example 2020-01-07 17:10:44 email key";
const API_CONTEXT: &str = "BLAKE3 example 2020-01-07 17:11:21 API key";
let input_key_material = b"usually at least 32 random bytes, not a password";
let email_key = blake3::derive_key(EMAIL_CONTEXT, input_key_material);
let api_key = blake3::derive_key(API_CONTEXT, input_key_material);
assert_ne!(email_key, api_key);
The C implementation
See c/README.md.
Other implementations
We post links to third-party bindings and implementations on the
@BLAKE3team Twitter account whenever
we hear about them. Some highlights include an optimized Go
implementation, Wasm bindings for
Node.js and browsers, binary
wheels for Python, .NET
bindings, and JNI
bindings.
Contributing
Please see CONTRIBUTING.md.
Intellectual property
The Rust code is copyright Jack O'Connor, 2019-2020. The C code is
copyright Samuel Neves and Jack O'Connor, 2019-2020. The assembly code
is copyright Samuel Neves, 2019-2020.
This work is released into the public domain with CC0 1.0.
Alternatively, it is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
Adoption & deployment
Here's a (non-exhaustive) list of protocols and software that use BLAKE3:
Miscellany
- @veorq and
@oconnor663 did a podcast
interview about designing BLAKE3.