On 29C3 djb, Jean-Philippe Aumasson and Martin Boßlet gave a very interesting talk on SipHash (see the video).

In short - SipHash is a new hash, created especially to save you from hash flooding attacks. The hash takes two parameters - a 128 bit "secret" key and an arbitrary data blob. This is different from traditional hashes which required only a data blob as an input. SipHash outputs a secure 64 bit hash.

SipHash is described in detail in the extremely well written paper.

python

SipHash seems to be pretty easy to implement - I took a chance and implemented it in Python: https://github.com/majek/pysiphash.

Use pip for the installation:

$ pip install siphash

Usage is rather obvious:

>>> import siphash
>>> key = '0123456789ABCDEF'
>>> siphash.SipHash_2_4(key, 'a').hash()
12398370950267227270L

c

I also wrote a C version, although I must admit the code is quite closely based on the reference implementation.

The minimalistic usage example:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <string.h>

uint64_t siphash24(const char *in, unsigned long inlen,
                   const char k[16]);

int main() {
    char key[16] = {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0xa,0xb,0xc,0xd,0xe,0xf};
    char *pt = "hello world!";
    uint64_t hash = siphash24(pt, strlen(pt), key);
    printf("plaintext=%s hash=%llu\n", pt, hash);
    return 0;
}

In my C SipHash implementation I tried to keep the code as short and as readable as possible. In total the code is 90-odd lines long of which around half is real code.

45 lines of C code is an excellent result for a strong hash. Thanks Jean-Philippe for a great hash!

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