Password Hashing Competition - Survey and Benchmark

Password hashing is the common approach for maintaining users' password-related information that is later used for authentication. A hash for each password is calculated and maintained at the service provider end. When a user logins the service, the hash of the given pass- word is computed and contrasted with the stored hash. If the two hashes match, the authentication is successful. However, in many cases the pass- words are just hashed by a cryptographic hash function or even stored in clear. These poor password protection practises have lead to ecient attacks that expose the users' passwords. PBKDF2 is the only standard- ized construction for password hashing. Other widely used primitives are bcrypt and scrypt. The low variety of methods derive the international cryptographic community to conduct the Password Hashing Competi- tion (PHC). The competition aims to identify new password hashing schemes suitable for widespread adoption. It started in 2013 with 22 active submissions. Nine nalists are announced during 2014. In 2015, a small portfolio of schemes will be proposed. This paper provides the rst survey and benchmark analysis of the 22 proposals. All proposals are evaluated on the same platform over a common benchmark suite. We measure the execution time, code size and memory consumption of PBKDF2, bcrypt, scrypt, and the 22 PHC schemes. The rst round re- sults are summarized along with a benchmark analysis that is focused on the nine nalists and contributes to the nal selection of the winners.

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