ChaCha20-BLAKE3

Simple, Secure and Fast encryption for any CPU.

ChaCha20-BLAKE3 is a secure Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) algorithm that is:

• more secure than classic AEADs by providing full context commitment
• uses long nonces that can be safely generated randomly
• doesn't require any specific harware instruction but instead scales with the width of the SIMD instructions of your CPU (AVX2 / AVX-512 on amd64 and NEON / SVE on arm)

Which make it a great fit for everything from microcontrollers to huge servers.

It has been designed to be the only encryption algorithm you will ever need.

Specification

https://kerkour.com/chacha20-blake3

Performance

Indicative single-core performance of pure-Rust, non-optimized implementations from the official implementation and the Rust Crypto project.

Message Size	ChaCha20-BLAKE3	XChaCha20-Poly1305	AES-256-GCM
64 B	103 MB/s	116 MB/s	540 MB/s
1 KB	523 MB/s	767 MB/s	1,287 MB/s
64 KB	2,153 MB/s	1,636 MB/s	1,475 MB/s
1 MB	3,297 MB/s	1,654 MB/s	1,476 MB/s
10 MB	3,353 MB/s	1,664 MB/s	1,477 MB/s

Machine: AMD EPYC 9R45 (virtualized, AWS ma8.xlarge)

Usage

Warning ⚠️: A (key, nonce) pair SHOULD NEVER be used to encrypt two messages. You can use either the same key with unique random nonces, an unique key with random or fixed nonces, or the same key with a non-repeating counter in the first X bytes of the nonce. See the specification to learn how much data you can safely encrypt.

Cargo.toml

[dependencies]
chacha20-blake3 = { git = "https://github.com/skerkour/chacha20-blake3", branch = "main" }

use chacha20_blake3::ChaCha20Blake3;

fn main() {
    // DO NOT USE A ALL-ZERO KEY / NONCE, THIS CODE IS FOR DEMONSTRATION ONLY
    let key = [0u8; 32];
    let nonce = [0u8; 24];
    // or with an u64 counter to encrypt up to 2^64 messages with a single key:
    // let mut nonce = [0u8; 24];
    // nonce[..8].copy_from_slice(&counter.to_le_bytes());

    let message = b"Hello World!";

    let cipher = ChaCha20Blake3::new(key);

    let ciphertext: Vec<u8> = cipher.encrypt(&nonce, message, &[]);

    let plaintext: Vec<u8> = cipher.decrypt(&nonce, &ciphertext, &[]).unwrap();

    assert_eq!(plaintext, message);
}

Features

Feature	Default?	Description
std	✓	Enables use of the standard library such as runtime SIMD detection. Enabling std automatically enables alloc.
alloc	✓	Enables the encrypt / decrypt APIs that allocate memory.
zeroize	✓	Enables zeroize to erase sensitive secrets from memory.

ChaCha12-BLAKE3

The old version, ChaCha12-BLAKE3 is available on the chacha12-blake3 branch but won't receive any further update.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.txt