BLAKE

Reference implementation of the SHA-3 finalist BLAKE, a family of cryptographic hash functions composed of 4 instances:

• BLAKE-224
• BLAKE-256
• BLAKE-384
• BLAKE-512

These implementations aim to simplicity and compactness rather than performance.

BLAKE was designed by Jean-Philippe Aumasson with Luca Henzen, Willi Meier, and Raphael C.-W. Phan.

BLAKE2 is an improved version of BLAKE, which has its own code repo.

Usage

Running

  make

will build the 4 executables blake224, blake256, blake384, blake512.

  ./blake256

verifies 2 test vectors and shows an error message upon failed test, and

  ./blake256 [file1] [file2] [...]

hashes the files passed as arguments.

Similar executables are provided for BLAKE-224, BLAKE-384, and BLAKE-512.

Intellectual property

The BLAKE reference code is released under CC0 license, a public domain-like licence.

We aren't aware of any patents or patent applications relevant to BLAKE, and we aren't planning to apply for any.

References

The BLAKE page includes

• specifications of BLAKE
• slides of BLAKE presentations at conferences and workshops
• a list of third-party implementations and modules
• references to cryptanalysis results