We are proud to give back to the community with this announcement of the release of LibSWIFFT.
LibSWIFFT is an open-source production-ready C/C++ library providing SWIFFT, one of the fastest available secure hash functions that is also collision-resistant as well as facilitates post-quantum digital signature schemes and zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge of a preimage (ZKPoKP). LibSWIFFT is optimized for short blocks of input and runs at a rate of less than 5 cycles/byte single-threaded on a modern commodity computer with AVX2.
LibSWIFFT is currently intended to be used by cryptography researchers and developers. It provides clean easy-to-use C/C++ APIs with high-performance implementations and is well-tested
and well-documented. Other available implementations of the SWIFFT function do not provide all these benefits. For further details, the reader is referred to the official LibSWIFFT repository.
LibSWIFFT implements the SWIFFT (Lyubashevsky et al., 2008) secure homomorphic hash function useful in constructing post-quantum protocols – ones that are resistant to attacks utilizing quantum computers. Such protocols are relevant today due to recent advances in quantum computing technology. In late 2017, NIST started a process for standardizing post-quantum cryptography, suggesting that it believes it may not be too long before a practical quantum-computer that threatens critical security standards (including Internet ones) based on classical cryptography will become a reality. Consequently, post-quantum cryptography is becoming more relevant today and perhaps even urgent to develop
LibSWIFFT was developed with reference to the SWIFFTX (Arbitman et al., 2008) submission to the NIST SHA-3 competition in 2008.