Move over MD5. Here's Blake2

There's more than one way to compute a secure hash, from MD5 to SHA-3 to SHA-1 and beyond. So who cares about yet another: Blake2?

There are a couple of reasons you might be interested in checking out Blake2: It was rated best hash function in the SHA-3 competition, is faster than MD5, and cryptographers find that it's similar to the well-regarded SHA-2 algorithm in ways that matter.

Says developer Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn:

Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Samuel Neves, Christian Winnerlein, and I decided that what the world needed was not just a secure hash function that was faster than Keccak, but one that was faster than MD5! This is because MD5 (and SHA-1) continue to be very widely used, even in new applications, even though MD5 and SHA-1 are unsafe for many uses. We hypothesized that offering engineers a hash function that was both faster and more secure than their beloved MD5 or SHA-1 might be more effective than haranguing them to upgrade to an alternative that is more secure but slower.

Have a look for yourself at Wilcox-O'Hearn's page.