Provos: Bcrypt at 25

[Posted May 28, 2023 by corbet]

Niels Provos reflects on 25 years of experience with Bcrypt and ponders the future of password security in a ;login article.

Bcrypt's endurance can be attributed to several other factors beyond our intentional algorithm design. Its wide availability in open-source implementations has facilitated widespread adoption and integration into various systems. According to Wikipedia, there are implementations of bcrypt in C, C++, C#, Embarcadero Delphi, Elixir, Go, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. Moreover, bcrypt's focus on computational cost scaling makes it an attractive choice for large Internet services compared to newer algorithms like Argon2, which also scale in memory consumption.

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Provos: Bcrypt at 25

Posted May 28, 2023 16:38 UTC (Sun) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

>Moreover, bcrypt's focus on computational cost scaling makes it an attractive choice for large Internet services compared to newer algorithms like Argon2, which also scale in memory consumption.

Well, Argon2 can also be used with rather low memory consumption of only a couple of kB and a big iteration factor to make it scale on computational cost rather than memory cost.
I think you would have to be very limited on memory or have an enormous amount of parallel computations for that to be a memory problem.
Therefore, I don't really see how bcrypt would be more attractive here, except for very special corner cases.