argon2

The fastest and easiest to use Argon2 bindings for Go!

Features

• Zero dependencies
• Easy to use API, including generation of raw and encoded hashes
• Up to date & used in production environments
• Up to 180-200% as fast as golang.org/x/crypto/argon2, allowing you to apply more secure settings while keeping the same latency

Usage

See examples/example.go for a simple introduction and try it out with:

go run examples/example.go

Performance

This library makes use of SSE, SSE2, SSSE3 and XOP, depending on whether they are enabled during compilation. This can be done by adding appropriate gcc optimization flags to the CGO_CFLAGS environment variable.

Here's an example which you could set before running go build etc.:

export CGO_CFLAGS="-O3 -march=native"

In this example -march=native will optimize the program for the current platform you're compiling on. If you're planning to deploy this library in a different environment you should replace it with a matching value listed here.

This way you can achieve a significant performance improvement. You can use this performance improvement to apply stronger hash settings and thus improve security at the same cost.

Current downsides

This package uses cgo like all Go bindings and thus comes with all it's downsides. Among others:

• cgo makes cross-compilation hard
• Excessive thread spawning¹

¹ Almost every time this library hashes something the scheduler will notice that a Goroutine is blocked in a cgo call and will spawn a new, costly, native thread. To prevent this you may use my workerpool project to set up a worker pool like this.

Modifications to Argon2

Based on fba7b9a.

• Moved blake2 code into the root source directory and adjusted include paths to match this change.
• Merged ref.c and opt.c into one file (ref_opt.c). This allows us to use the __SSE__ precompiler flag for SSE detection instead of relying on a Makefile.