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Day 8 — BLAKE2 Implementation #2, A New Direction?

September 12th, 2020

Hello, all! Welcome to CryptoCL.

Today, I completed implementing BLAKE2b and BLAKE2s. It appears that, although I cannot accurately tell what is happening when running the programs, they do successfully work.

I met with Dr. Marmorstein yesterday to discuss our next move. We explored through the code, and ran into an issue — a core function of BLAKE2, known as function G, runs sequentially. On the outset of a normal program, this is not an issue. However, for OpenCL, this is grave news. As discussed earlier, OpenCL is used to allow for parallelism. However, since the hash function for BLAKE2 requires values to be updated and then used elsewhere within the same function, it is impossible to be able to run the function in parallel, as information would not be properly updated or even overwritten.

We decided to try and brainstorm a new plan of action. In the meantime, I worked to implement the ROUND function as OpenCL kernels. ROUND calls the function G eight times — the first four and the second four are independent from each other. Ergo, we believe that if we run this function as two kernels for each half of the ROUND function, we can at least achieve some form of parallelism.

For both BLAKE2b and BLAKE2s, I implemented two files for each called “blake2?_round(x)_kernel.cl”, where ? indicates either b or s, and x signals 1 or 2 for the top or bottom half of the ROUND function, respectively. These functions are basically untouched from how they are presented in the original function — just now the function has a __kernel prefix and all variables have a __global prefix.

Next time, I will meet with Dr. Marmorstein to discuss where to go next with this project — chances are, we will design our own, primitive cryptographic hashing algorithm to implement that will be able to run in parallel. One idea is run operations of pieces of the input in parallel, combining the results together until we get the encrypted message.

Until then, have a good night!

Kyle Jenkins.

Time spent today: 1 hour 45 minutes
Total Time: 9 hours

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