The Mighty Argon2: The Cybersecurity Titan

Those “How long will it take to crack your password” tables are all wrong, as they assume fast hashing of a password (such as SHA-256), but where most passwords are now stored using a slow hashing method. A single 8-character scrypt stored password, for example, could cost you over $19 billion to crack, and where you won’t have much money left to crack the next one.

So, which is the best method to store passwords or derive encryption keys (KDF — Key Derivation Function) from passwords?

A SHA-256
B PBKDF2
C scrypt
D bcrypt
E Argon2

Well, A is definitely wrong, as it is not resistant to brute force attacks. If you need to comply with FIPS-140, then your only choice is B— PBKDF2. But, if not, it’s either going to be scrypt, bcrypt or Argon2. In terms of security, though, Argon2 is better than bcrypt and scrypt, and supports a wider range of options for breaking through GPU/ASIC crackers. So the ranking of best to worst is:

1. Argon2
2. scrypt (see Postscript for more information on scrypt).
3. bcrypt
4. PBKDF2
5. SHA-256