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key-derivation function

A deliberately slow, salted way of turning a password into a stored value, so stolen values are hard to crack.

A password key-derivation function (scrypt, Argon2, bcrypt, PBKDF2) maps a password and a salt to a fixed-length value at a tunable cost in time and memory, making brute-force guessing of stolen hashes expensive.

Examples

  • The greenhouse back end stores user passwords with scrypt at n = 2**14, r = 8, about 16 MB and tens of milliseconds per hash, instead of a plain sha256(password).

See also

salt bearer token authentication
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