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b3sum, published by the BLAKE3 Team and currently at version 1.8.7 with three recorded versions in the catalog, is a command-line implementation of the BLAKE3 cryptographic hash function, falling within the security and checksum utility category. Its purpose is to compute and print the BLAKE3 hashes of files or of data received via standard input, making it suitable for integrity verification, file fingerprinting, checksum generation, and scripting workflows that require fast and reliable hashing. BLAKE3 is designed to be much faster than MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, SHA-3, and BLAKE2 while remaining secure, unlike MD5 and SHA-1, and resistant to length extension attacks, unlike SHA-2. Because it is internally structured as a Merkle tree, the algorithm is highly parallelizable across any number of threads and SIMD lanes and supports verified streaming and incremental updates. In addition to functioning as a regular hash, BLAKE3 can serve as a pseudorandom function (PRF), message authentication code (MAC), key derivation function (KDF), and extendable output function (XOF), all within a single algorithm that has no variants and performs well on x86-64 as well as on smaller architectures. The function is based on an optimized instance of the established BLAKE2 hash function combined with the original Bao tree mode, and its specifications and design rationale are documented in the official BLAKE3 paper. The default output size produced by b3sum is 256 bits, and the current version of Bao implements verified streaming with BLAKE3. As a lightweight command-line tool, b3sum fits naturally into developer toolchains, continuous integration pipelines, backup validation routines, and any environment where high-throughput, cryptographically sound hashing of files or streamed data is required.
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