Quark

Reference implementation of Quark, a family of lightweight cryptographic hash functions composed of 4 instances:

• u-Quark (at least 64-bit security)
• d-Quark (at least 80-bit security)
• s-Quark (at least 112-bit security)
• c-Quark (at least 160-bit security)

Quark instances can be used as cryptographic hash functions, as well as building blocks of authenticated ciphers.

Quark was designed by Jean-Philippe Aumasson with Luca Henzen, Simon Knellwolf, Willi Meier, and Maria Naya-Plasencia.

Usage

Running

  make

will build sanity checks (test vectors) for all 4 Quark instances. For example:

  ./uquark_test

verifies that u-Quark returns the expected hash value given the empty message, and

  ./uquark_test_debug

does the same and prints intermediate values.

Similar executables are provided for d-Quark, s-Quark, and c-Quark.

Intellectual property

The Quark reference code is released under CC0 license, a public domain-like licence.

We aren't aware of any patents or patent applications relevant to Quark, and we aren't planning to apply for any.

References

The Quark page includes

• academic publications (CHES 2010, Journal of Cryptology)
• slides of Quark presentations at conferences and workshops