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by danesparza 3084 days ago
This seems incredibly fast. Taking the benchmarks on the sites at face value, this seems like it's roughly twice as fast as xxHash.

I also appreciate this line in the README: "HighwayHash is not a general purpose cryptographic hash function (such as Blake2b, SHA-3 or SHA-2) and should not be used if strong collision resistance is required"

I am curious to know what the threshold for "strong collision resistance" is.

3 comments

It's used for 32bit hashes in hash tables, so brute forcing this to create thousands of collisions on a desktop PC takes 2-4 min. Same for SipHash btw.

For hash tables you should not rely on the false security claims of these slow hashes anyway, rather implement proper collisions strategies to get rid of O(n) attacks.

Check out the graph at https://github.com/fwessels/HashCompare that compares different hashing techniques.

And also we've done some predictions for collisions, see: https://github.com/fwessels/HashCompare/issues/1#issuecommen...

Not a cryptographer, but basically it must not be computability feasible (ie not just hard) to find a collision.