BLAKE2: A New Alternative To MD5 & SHA-2/SHA-3

[kazetsukai]

Improved performance isn't necessarily a good thing, when it comes to these sorts of hash functions. The faster a hash function, the easier it is to brute-force.

Funny. BLAKE2 (being faster than MD5 yet more secure) seems to disprove that absolute (and utterly incorrect) correlation.

The takeaway message for us lowly non-security types was pretty simple, yet none of us got it: I'll be pretty happy when I can replace the md5sum command line tool with something faster that I can have a reasonable amount of confidence in.

[Licaon]

The algorithm was clearly a finalist but I don't know if blake2 is the same code as that which was in the competition.
So, as I said, it may be a reimplementation of a sha3 finalist algorithm.

https://blake2.net/blake2_20121223.pdf TL;DR "BLAKE was already more secure, we reduced some params to gain speed"