Password Hashing Algorithms

The cluster focuses on debates about secure password hashing practices, primarily comparing bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF2, and Argon2 against fast hashes like SHA-256 or SHA-1, emphasizing slow, memory-hard functions to resist brute-force attacks.

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Keywords

e.g PBKDF2 CPU MUST PHP NTLM GPU wolframalpha.com HN SHA2 bcrypt hashes password sha passwords hash chars salt memory hashing

Sample Comments

franciscop Dec 22, 2015 View on HN

Not really, bcrypt is the only bet, SHA-256 is also too fast

tedunangst Dec 14, 2010 View on HN

ok, that's a fair point. i guess i just believe bcrypt does a better job than that. :)

jiggy2011 Jan 29, 2013 View on HN

Can't you just use bcrypt/scrypt and be done with it?

tptacek Mar 19, 2012 View on HN

It's not better than bcrypt for password storage; it's marginally worse. See downthread.

sankage Feb 6, 2013 View on HN

Why use PBKDF2 instead of bcrypt for password hashing?

floatboth Jul 8, 2019 View on HN

bcrypt is a password hashing algorithm. It's totally fine, but newer better ones exist (scrypt and now Argon2). libsodium provides them.

cperciva May 2, 2009 View on HN

Or use scrypt, which is far more secure than bcrypt. :-)

Kiro Feb 16, 2014 View on HN

Why is bcrypt better than SHA-1?

Xk Jun 23, 2011 View on HN

What you describe is basically PBKDF1. If you wanted to make it slightly better, you could go with PBKDF2. It's true that bcrypt is better in some ways, but you're fine with what you're doing now. If you really wanted to improve on things you could go with scrypt which eats memory also, but it's more difficult to get things to work right.

guelo Nov 15, 2010 View on HN

That's the point of that article, use bcrypt because it's slow.