Poseidon Hash Benchmarks in Rust

This is a repository comparing different Poseidon implementations in Rust. This project is supported by an Ethereum Foundation grant FY23-1156.

Repositories that are being used in this project are:

1. https://github.com/dusk-network/Poseidon252
2. https://github.com/CryptoExperts/poseidon
3. https://github.com/risc0/risc0
4. https://github.com/lurk-lab/neptune

To run the benchmarks use the command cargo +nightly bench.

Default Poseidon parameters

Here we present the default parameters of the different instantiations of Poseidon hash used in the benchmarks. Note that Cryptoexperts only has the permutation function in C language, therefore, we constructed a sponge function in Rust for it. The Risc0 implementation has two versions, one with a field of 256 bits and another with the babybear field of 31 bits.

Repository	Field	Security	S-box	Full rounds	Partial rounds	Width
Dusk-Network	BLS12-381 scalar	128	$x^5$	8	59	5
Risc0	256 bits/Babybear	128	$x^8$	8	42/21	3/24
Neptune	BLS12-381 scalar	128	$x^5$	8	55	3
Cryptoexperts	$2^{251} + 17 \cdot 2^{192} + 1$	128	$x^3$	8	83	3

Results

All the results presented here were executed over an Intel Xeon CPU of 2.40GHz. See here for a list of detailed results.

• Default values from corresponding repositories.

  The inputs in this case were randomly generated using the default instantiations of the repositories. The table below shows the number of bits required by the field elements. Recall that each element from the scalar field of BLS12-381 uses 255 bits, cryptoexperts uses four limbs of unsigned 64 bits integers, and each element of Babybear uses 31 bits.

Number of elements	BLS12-381	256 bits	Babybear
4	1020	1024	124
8	2040	2048	248
12	3060	3072	372
16	1530	4096	496
20	5100	5120	620
24	6120	6144	744
28	7140	7168	868