Hash function speed test
Preparing...
From the early internet to the post-quantum era. Each generation brought faster, more secure hashing — but the old ones never went away.
The original workhorse. Fast, simple, and now cryptographically broken — but still used for checksums everywhere.
BrokenReplaced MD5 for certificates and signatures. Google produced a real collision in 2017. Deprecated but lingering.
BrokenThe current standard. Designed by the NSA, standardized by NIST. Powers TLS, Bitcoin, and every certificate chain on the internet. Sequential and can't parallelize.
Current standardNIST's backup plan. A completely different internal structure (sponge construction) as insurance if SHA-2 ever falls. Slower in software.
Alternative standardThe predecessor to BLAKE3. Faster than SHA-256 in software, used in Argon2 password hashing. Single-threaded only.
TrustedParallelizable tree hashing. Scales with every core. No hardware acceleration needed. The fastest secure hash function available.
FastestThroughput at 10 MB — large enough to measure real performance, small enough to run quickly.
The fastest hash function from 1992 (MD5) has been broken for years. The fastest secure hash function from 2020 (BLAKE3) is also the fastest hash function, period.
These results were measured on your MacBook Pro with Apple M2 Pro. SHA-256 had dedicated hardware acceleration — and still lost.