Blake3.NET

Blake3.NET is a fast managed wrapper around the SIMD Rust implementations of the BLAKE3 cryptographic hash function.

The current native version of BLAKE3 used by Blake3.NET is 1.2.0

Features

• Compatible with .NET5.0+.
• Fast interop with Span friendly API.
• API similar to the Blake3 Rust API.
• CPU SIMD Hardware accelerated with dynamic CPU feature detection.
  • Multiple platforms supported.
• Incremental update API via Hasher.
• Support for multi-threading hashing via Hasher.UpdateWithJoin.

Usage

Hash a buffer directly:

var hash = Blake3.Hasher.Hash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("BLAKE3"));
Console.WriteLine(hash);
// Prints f890484173e516bfd935ef3d22b912dc9738de38743993cfedf2c9473b3216a4

Or use the Hasher struct for incremental updates:

// Hasher is a disposable struct!
using var hasher = Blake3.Hasher.New();
hasher.Update(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("BLAKE3"));
var hash = hasher.Finalize();

Or seek in the output "stream" to any position:

using var hasher = Blake3.Hasher.New();
hasher.Update(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("BLAKE3"));
var hashAtPosition = new byte[1024];
var hash = hasher.Finalize(4242, hashAtPosition);

Or hash a stream on the go with Blake3Stream:

using var blake3Stream = new Blake3Stream(new MemoryStream());
blake3Stream.Write(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("BLAKE3"));
var hash = blake3Stream.ComputeHash();

Or produce a message authentication code using a 256-bit key:

using var blake3 = Hasher.NewKeyed(macKey);
blake3.UpdateWithJoin(message);
var tag = blake3.Finalize();
byte[] authenticationTag = tag.AsSpanUnsafe().ToArray();

Or derive a subkey from a master key:

const string context = "[application] [commit timestamp] [purpose]";
using var blake3 = Hasher.NewDeriveKey(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(context));
blake3.Update(inputKeyingMaterial);
var derivedKey = blake3.Finalize();
byte[] subkey = derivedKey.AsSpanUnsafe().ToArray();

Platforms

Blake3.NET is supported on the following platforms:

• win-x64, win-x86, win-arm64, win-arm
• linux-x64, linux-arm64, linux-arm
• osx-x64, osx-arm64

Benchmarks

The benchmarks are running with BenchmarkDotNet .NET 5.0 and done on multiple different sizes compared with the following implementations:

• Blake3.NET (Blake3 Native Version: 0.3.7)
• Blake2Fast 2.0.0
• System.Security.Cryptography.SHA256 of .NET 5.0

For the 1,000,000 bytes test, Blake3 is using the multi-threading version provided by Blake3 (Hasher.UpdateWithJoin method).

Results

• In general, Blake3 is much faster than SHA256 which is depending on whether your CPU supports Intel SHA Extensions.
  • Blake3 can be from 2x to 10x times faster than SHA256
• The multi-threading version can give a significant boost if the data to hash is big enough
• Blake3 is usually working best on large input.

Results

The CPU before Intel Ice Lake or AMD Zen don't have the Intel SHA CPU extensions.

In that case, Blake3 is around 5x to 10x times faster than the built-in SHA256.

The following benchmark was ran on an Intel Core i7-4980HQ CPU 2.80GHz (Haswell):

BenchmarkDotNet=v0.12.1, OS=Windows 10.0.18363.1139 (1909/November2018Update/19H2)
Intel Core i7-4980HQ CPU 2.80GHz (Haswell), 1 CPU, 8 logical and 4 physical cores
.NET Core SDK=5.0.100
  [Host]     : .NET Core 5.0 (CoreCLR 5.0.20.51904, CoreFX 5.0.20.51904), X64 RyuJIT
  DefaultJob : .NET Core 5.0.0 (CoreCLR 5.0.20.51904, CoreFX 5.0.20.51904), X64 RyuJIT

Results with SHA CPU extensions

If your CPU has Intel SHA CPU extensions, then Blake3 is on average ~2x times faster than SHA256.

The following benchmarks was ran on a AMD Ryzen 9 3900X:

BenchmarkDotNet=v0.12.1, OS=Windows 10.0.19041.630 (2004/?/20H1)
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, 1 CPU, 24 logical and 12 physical cores
.NET Core SDK=5.0.100
  [Host]     : .NET Core 5.0 (CoreCLR 5.0.20.51904, CoreFX 5.0.20.51904), X64 RyuJIT
  DefaultJob : .NET Core 5.0.0 (CoreCLR 5.0.20.51904, CoreFX 5.0.20.51904), X64 RyuJIT

How to Build?

You need to install the .NET 6 SDK or latest Visual Studio 2022. Then from the root folder:

$ dotnet build src -c Release

In order to rebuild the native binaries, you need to run the build scripts from lib/blake3_dotnet

License

This software is released under the BSD-Clause 2 license.

Author

Alexandre Mutel aka xoofx.