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Oboron Properties

1. Referenceable Prefixes

If you've used Git, you're already familiar with prefix entropy: you can reference commits with just the first 7 characters of their SHA1 hash (like git show a1b2c3d). This works because cryptographic hashes distribute entropy evenly across all characters.

Oboron schemes exhibit similar prefix quality. Consider these comparisons:

Short Reference Strength:

• Git SHA1 (7 hex chars): 28 bits of entropy
• Oboron (6 base32 chars): 30 bits of entropy
• Oboron (7 base32 chars): 35 bits of entropy

Collision Resistance:

For a 1-in-a-million chance of two items sharing the same prefix:

• Git 7-char prefix (28 bits): After ~38 items
• Oboron 6-char prefix (30 bits): After ~52 items
• Oboron 7-char prefix (35 bits): After ~262 items

(These estimates assume uniform ciphertext distribution under a fixed key.)

Practical Implications:

In a system with 1,000 unique items using 7-character Oboron prefixes:

• Collision probability: ~0.007% (1 in 14,000)
• In a system with 10,000 items: ~0.7% (1 in 140)

This enables Git-like workflows for moderate-scale systems: database IDs, URL slugs, or commit references that are both human-friendly and cryptographically robust for everyday use cases.

2. Deterministic Injectivity

Comparing the prefix collision resistance in the previous section, Oboron and standard hashing algorithms were compared against each other. But when we consider the full output, then they are not on the same plane: while SHA1 and SHA256 collision probabilities are astronomically small, they are never zero, and the birthday paradox risk can become a factor in large systems even with the full hash. Oboron, on the other hand, is a symmetric encryption protocol, and as such it is collision free (although applying this label to an encryption protocol is awkward): for a fixed key and within the block-cipher domain limits, Oboron is injective (one-to-one), i.e. two different inputs can never result in the same output.

3. Performance Comparison

Oboron is optimized for performance with short strings, often exceeding both SHA256 and JWT performance while providing reversible encryption.

Note: As a general-purpose encryption protocol, Oboron is not a replacement for either JWT or SHA256. We use those two for baseline comparison, as they are both standard and highly optimized libraries.

Note: Benchmark data is from the Rust reference implementation.

* Note: JWT baseline (HMAC-SHA256) provides authentication without encryption. Despite comparing against our stronger a-tier (secure + authenticated), Oboron maintains performance advantages while providing full confidentiality.

Performance advantages:

• All Oboron authenticated schemes outperform JWT for both encoding and decoding

4. Output Length Comparison

A more complete output length comparison is given in the Obtext Lengths reference.