STHash

STHash is a fast, keyed, cryptographic hash function designed to process large, possibly untrusted data.

The flipside is that using a secret key (or, in this implementation, a secret seed) is mandatory. This is not as a general-purpose hash function.

A typical use of STHash is to compute keys for locally cached objects.

The construction relies on:

• A composition of two ϵ-almost-∆-universal functions, NH and Poly1305. See the Adiantum paper for a justification of this composition.
• The KMAC keyed hash function, both to produce the final tag and as a XOF to derive the NH, Poly1305 and finalization keys.

The current code is portable, written in safe Rust, and has a lot of room for optimization.

However, it is already consistently faster than optimized BLAKE2bp implementations on all platforms.

You can expect future versions to be even faster.

Usage

use sthash::*;
use rand::{thread_rng, RngCore};

// This must be a random, secret seed.
let seed = [u8; SEED_BYTES];
thread_rng().fill_bytes(&mut seed);

// The key constructor accepts an optional application name
// Different personalization strings produce different keys
// from the same `seed`.
let key = Key::from_seed(&seed, Some(b"Documentation example"));

// Another personalization string, such as the purpose of the
// `Hasher`, can be provided here as well.
let hasher = Hasher::new(key, None);

// Returns a 256-bit hash.
let h1 = hasher.hash(data);

// `Hasher` structures can safely be reused to hash more data.
let h2 = hasher.hash(data2);

Benchmarks

Measurements from the built-in benchmark, hashing 1 Mb data. Rust 1.33. Get your own data with the cargo bench command.

Comparison with BLAKE2bp (from blake2b-simd):

Comparison with HMAC-SHA2 (from rust-crypto):

References

• UMAC: Fast and Secure Message Authentication (J. Black, S.Halevi, H.Krawczyk, T.Krovetz, and P. Rogaway)
• The Poly1305-AES message authentication code (Daniel J. Bernstein)
• Adiantum: length-preserving encryption for entry-level processors (Paul Crowley and Eric Biggers)
• Short-output universal hash functions andtheir use in fast and secure data authentication (Yannick Seurin)

Thanks

This crate is based on work by Paul Crowley and Eric Biggers.