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Really nice writeup, but why not also append a discussion of scrypt and its use of both CPU work factor and memory-hard functions to confound Moore's Law? It's

Really nice writeup, but why not also append a discussion of scrypt and its use of both CPU work factor and memory-hard functions to confound Moore's Law? It's the next step after bcrypt, after all. It may not be be implemented across as many platforms as bcrypt yet, but there's plenty for people to experiment with [1], if only for learning and educational purposes. 1. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/security/scrypt/ http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/security/scrypt/ http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/oneiric/man1/scrypt.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/oneiric/man1/scrypt.1.ht... http://rubygems.org/gems/scrypt http://rubygems.org/gems/scrypt http://pypi.python.org/pypi/scrypt/ http://pypi.python.org/pypi/scrypt/ https://github.com/search?q=scrypt https://github.com/search?q=scrypt

jgrahamc 14y ago
The article describes what we did at CloudFlare, not a general survey of cryptographic hash functions. We chose not to use scrypt because it is relatively new. I fully expect that scrypt will stand the test of time and I'll probably be happy using it.
tomjen3 14y ago
Please not again. Discussions of passwords always brings up these stupid scrypt bcrypt fanboy comments. Repeating it one more time won't change anything.
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  Easy there. You're projecting and reading a little too much into it. I'm not a fanboy, it simply struck me as a conspicuous oversight to write what appeared to be a survey of password hashing history and technology, and not mention scrypt at all. It's very instructive, especially for people new to this stuff, to see the contrast between bcrypt's CPU-hard algorithm and scrypt's CPU-hard + memory-hard algorithm. But jgrahamc's clarification above makes sense - it wasn't meant to be a general survey, but only what CloudFlare has done.

jgrahamc 14y ago

The article describes what we did at CloudFlare, not a general survey of cryptographic hash functions. We chose not to use scrypt because it is relatively new. I fully expect that scrypt will stand the test of time and I'll probably be happy using it.

tomjen3 14y ago

Please not again. Discussions of passwords always brings up these stupid scrypt bcrypt fanboy comments. Repeating it one more time won't change anything.

SkyMarshal 14y ago
Easy there. You're projecting and reading a little too much into it. I'm not a fanboy, it simply struck me as a conspicuous oversight to write what appeared to be a survey of password hashing history and technology, and not mention scrypt at all. It's very instructive, especially for people new to this stuff, to see the contrast between bcrypt's CPU-hard algorithm and scrypt's CPU-hard + memory-hard algorithm. But jgrahamc's clarification above makes sense - it wasn't meant to be a general survey, but only what CloudFlare has done.