"cryptography research findings 2026"

Cryptography Research Findings 2026

Overview

This document summarizes our research into modern Rust cryptographic algorithms and their integration into Vox.

Hash Selection

  • BLAKE3: Proven to be the fastest general-purpose cryptographic hash, scaling efficiently across CPU cores and SIMD lanes. Chosen for secure_hash.
  • XXHash (XXH3): Extremely fast non-cryptographic hash. Chosen for in-memory AST caching and bloom filters via fast_hash.
  • SHA-3: Kept strictly for external interop and standardized compliance. Chosen for compliance_hash.

AEAD Selection and the ZIG Ban

Initially, AEGIS was proposed due to hardware AES-NI acceleration. However, compiling its native C backends on Windows causes significant friction (requiring NASM, CMake). Patching it to pure-rust disables the hardware acceleration, leaving a pure-software fallback.

Benchmarks reveal that purely software-optimized primitives like chacha20poly1305 significantly outperform the pure-rust version of AEGIS. To ensure maximum zero-friction compilation across platforms while maintaining top-tier software performance, we have banned AEGIS.

Architecture

Cryptographic primitives are centralized into the vox-crypto crate. vox-clavis depends on this crate to prevent environment-parsing logic from bubbling into low-level compiler crates that only require hashing.