Photo by Eric Weber on Unsplash

For Crypto Speed, Taking The Highway is Great

Google — as a company — have vast data infrastructures. They thus need ways to quickly identify data objects and match them. So, they have been innovating in ways of producing ultra-fast hashing methods — both for short string and long string inputs. For their applications, the slowness of the cryptography hashes is just not good enough to provide the required scale. As a benchmark, a strong cryptography hash has a throughput of two or three cycles per byte (c/b), which means we can only process one byte in 2 or 3 cycles of the processor. The non-cryptography methods, though, can run a 0.2 c/b, and thus can run at many levels of magnitude faster than the cryptography methods.

And so, in 2017, Google released HighwayHash. It was created by Jyrki Alakuijala, Bill Cox, Jan Wassenberg [here] and based on SipHash. Overall, though, it has been assessed as running 5.2 times faster than SipHash for 1 KiB inputs. For many, SipHash is seen as one of the best non-cryptography hashes around and is generally free from security issues. HighwayHash is then based on the SipHash approach but has an enhancement that reduce the security level compared to SipHash, but which considerably improves the processing performance. As with SipHash, HighwayHash is a key-hashed method, and where we can apply a secret key to extend the range of hashes that are possible for a given input. If the…