AHash is a high speed keyed hashing algorithm intended for use in in-memory hashmaps. It provides a high quality 64 bit hash. AHash is designed for performance and is not cryptographically secure.
When it is available aHash takes advantage of the hardware AES instruction on X86 processors. If it is not available it falls back on a somewhat slower (but still DOS resistant) algorithm based on multiplication.
AHash is a keyed hash, so two instances initialized with different keys will produce completely different hashes and the resulting hashes cannot be predicted without knowing the keys. This prevents DOS attacks where an attacker sends a large number of items whose hashes collide that get used as keys in a hashmap.
AHash is the fastest DOS resistant hash for use in HashMaps available in the Rust language. Failing in any of these criteria will be treated as a bug.
AHash is not:
It is not intended that different computers using aHash will arrive at the same hash for the same input. Similarly the same computer running different versions of aHash may hash the same input to different values. By not requiring consistency aHash is able to tailor the algorithm and take advantage of specialized hardware instructions for higher performance.
Both aHash's aes variant and the fallback pass the full SMHasher test suite (the output of the tests is checked into the smhasher subdirectory.
At ~50GB/s aHash is the fastest algorithm to pass the full test suite by nearly a factor of 2. Even the fallback algorithm is in the top 5 in terms of throughput.
When it is available aHash uses AES rounds using the AES-NI instruction. AES-NI is very fast (on an intel i7-6700 it is as fast as a 64 bit multiplication.) and handles 16 bytes of input at a time, while being a very strong permutation.
This is obviously much faster than most standard approaches to hashing, and does a better job of scrambling data than most non-secure hashes.
On an intel i7-6700 compiled on nightly Rust with flags -C opt-level=3 -C target-cpu=native -C codegen-units=1:
| Input | SipHash 1-3 time | FnvHash time|FxHash time| aHash time| aHash Fallback* | |----------------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|---------------| | u8 | 9.3271 ns | 0.808 ns | 0.594 ns | 0.7704 ns | 0.781 ns | | u16 | 9.5139 ns | 0.803 ns | 0.594 ns | 0.7653 ns | 0.784 ns | | u32 | 9.1196 ns | 1.4424 ns | 0.594 ns | 0.7637 ns | 0.784 ns | | u64 | 10.854 ns | 3.0484 ns | 0.628 ns | 0.7788 ns | 0.800 ns | | u128 | 12.465 ns | 7.0728 ns | 0.799 ns | 0.6174 ns | 0.6337 ns | | 1 byte string | 11.745 ns | 2.4743 ns | 2.4000 ns | 1.4904 ns | 2.7111 ns | | 3 byte string | 12.066 ns | 3.5221 ns | 2.9253 ns | 1.4819 ns | 2.4416 ns | | 4 byte string | 11.634 ns | 4.0770 ns | 1.8818 ns | 1.5244 ns | 2.1690 ns | | 7 byte string | 14.762 ns | 5.9780 ns | 3.2282 ns | 1.5250 ns | 2.1706 ns | | 8 byte string | 13.442 ns | 4.0535 ns | 2.9422 ns | 1.7141 ns | 2.1694 ns | | 15 byte string | 16.880 ns | 8.3434 ns | 4.6070 ns | 1.7150 ns | 2.4403 ns | | 16 byte string | 15.155 ns | 7.5796 ns | 3.2619 ns | 1.7191 ns | 2.4394 ns | | 24 byte string | 16.521 ns | 12.492 ns | 3.5424 ns | 1.6325 ns | 2.7110 ns | | 68 byte string | 24.598 ns | 50.715 ns | 5.8312 ns | 5.5012 ns | 4.8805 ns | | 132 byte string| 39.224 ns | 119.96 ns | 11.777 ns | 7.3218 ns | 7.3331 ns | |1024 byte string| 254.00 ns | 1087.3 ns | 156.41 ns | 27.305 ns | 42.383 ns |
As you can see above aHash like FxHash provides a large speedup over SipHash-1-3 which is already nearly twice as fast as SipHash-2-4.
Rust's HashMap by default uses SipHash-1-3 because faster hash functions such as FxHash are predictable and vulnerable to denial of
service attacks. While aHash has both very strong scrambling and very high performance.
AHash performs well when dealing with large inputs because aHash reads 8 or 16 bytes at a time. (depending on availability of AES-NI)
Because of this, and it's optimized logic, aHash is able to outperform FxHash with strings.
It also provides especially good performance dealing with unaligned input.
(Notice the big performance gaps between 3 vs 4, 7 vs 8 and 15 vs 16 in FxHash above)
For more a more representative performance comparison which includes the overhead of using a HashMap, see HashBrown's benchmarks as HashBrown now uses aHash as it's hasher by default.
AHash is designed to prevent an adversary that does not know the key from being able to create hash collisions or partial collisions.
This achieved by ensuring that:
finish call at the end of the hash is designed to not expose individual bits of the internal state.
AHash should not be used for situations where cryptographic security is needed. It is not intended for this and will likely fail to hold up for several reasons.
There are several efforts to build a secure hash function that uses AES-NI for acceleration, but aHash is not one of them.
New versions of aHash may change the algorithm slightly resulting in the new version producing different hashes than the old version even with the same keys. Additionally, aHash does not guarantee that it won't produce different hash values for the same data on different machines, or even on the same machine when recompiled.
For this reason aHash is not recommended for cases where hashes need to be persisted.
Hardware AES instructions are built into Intel processors built after 2010 and AMD processors after 2012. It is also available on many other CPUs should in eventually be able to get aHash to work. However only X86 and X86-64 are the only supported architectures at the moment, as currently they are the only architectures for which Rust provides an intrinsic.
aHash also uses sse2 and sse3 instructions. X86 processors that have aesni also have these instruction sets.
Cryptographic hashes are designed to make is nearly impossible to find two items that collide when the attacker has full control over the input. This has several implications:
For a HashMap the requirements are different.
u32 or similar, and to be effective
the bucket that it should be hashed to needs to be computed in just a few CPu cycles.From a cryptography point of view, a hashmap needs something closer to a block cypher. Where the input can be quickly mixed in a way that cannot be reversed without knowing a key.
For a hashmap: Because aHash is faster.
SipHash is however useful in other contexts, such as for a HMAC, where aHash would be completely inappropriate.
SipHash-2-4 is designed to provide DOS attack resistance, and has no presently known attacks against this claim that doesn't involve learning bits of the key.
SipHash is also available in the "1-3" variant which is about twice as fast as the standard version.
The SipHash authors don't recommend using this variation when DOS attacks are a concern, but there are still no known
practical DOS attacks against the algorithm. Rust has opted for the "1-3" version as the default in std::collections::HashMap,
because the speed trade off of "2-4" was not worth it.
As you can see in the table above, aHash is much faster than even SipHash-1-3, but it also provides DOS resistance, and any attack against the accelerated form would likely involve a weakness in AES.
In terms of performance, aHash is faster than the FXhash for strings and byte arrays but not primitives. So it might seem like using Fxhash for hashmaps when the key is a primitive is a good idea. This is not the case.
When FX hash is operating on a 4 or 8 byte input such as a u32 or a u64, it reduces to multiplying the input by a fixed constant. This is a bad hashing algorithm because it means that lower bits can never be influenced by any higher bit. In the context of a hashmap where the low order bits are used to determine which bucket to put an item in, this isn't any better than the identity function. Any keys that happen to end in the same bit pattern will all collide. Some examples of where this is likely to occur are:
Like any non-keyed hash FxHash can be attacked. But FxHash is so prone to this that you may find yourself doing it accidentally.
For example, it is possible to accidentally introduce quadratic behavior by reading from one map in iteration order and writing to another.
Fxhash flaws make sense when you understand it for what it is. It is a quick and dirty hash, nothing more. it was not published and promoted by its creator, it was found!
Because it is error-prone, FxHash should never be used as a default. In specialized instances where the keys are understood it makes sense, but given that aHash is faster on almost any object, it's probably not worth it.
FnvHash is also a poor default. It only handles one byte at a time, so it's performance really suffers with large inputs. It is also non-keyed so it is still subject to DOS attacks and accidentally quadratic behavior.
Murmur, City, Metro, Farm and Highway are all related, and appear to directly replace one another. Sea and XX are independent and compete.
They are all fine hashing algorithms, they do a good job of scrambling data, but they are all targeted at a different usecase. They are intended to work in distributed systems where the hash is expected to be the same over time and from one computer to the next, efficiently hashing large volumes of data.
This is quite different from the needs of a Hasher used in a hashmap. In a map the typical value is under 10 bytes. None of these algorithms scale down to handle that small of data at a competitive time. What's more the restriction that they provide consistent output prevents them from taking advantage of different hardware capabilities on different CPUs. It makes since for a hashmap to work differently on a phone than on a server, or in wasm.
If you need to persist or transmit a hash of a file, then using one of these is probably a good idea. HighwayHash seems to be the preferred solution du jour. But inside a simple Hashmap, stick with aHash.
AquaHash is structured similarly to aHash. (Though the two were designed completely independently). AquaHash does not scale down nearly as well and
does poorly with for example a single i32 as input. It's only implementation at this point is in C++.
T1ha is fast at large sizes and the output is of high quality, but it is not clear what usecase it aims for. It has many different versions and is very complex, and uses hardware tricks, so one might infer it is meant for hashmaps like aHash. But any hash using it take at least 20ns, and it doesn't outperform even SipHash until the input sizes are larger than 128 bytes. So uses are likely niche.
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