General | |
---|---|
Designers | Colin Percival |
First published | 2009 |
Cipher detail | |
Digest sizes | variable |
Block sizes | variable |
Rounds | variable |
In cryptography, scrypt (pronounced "ess crypt"[1]) is a password-based key derivation function created by Colin Percival in March 2009, originally for the Tarsnap online backup service.[2][3] The algorithm was specifically designed to make it costly to perform large-scale custom hardware attacks by requiring large amounts of memory. In 2016, the scrypt algorithm was published by IETF as RFC 7914.[4] A simplified version of scrypt is used as a proof-of-work scheme by a number of cryptocurrencies, first implemented by an anonymous programmer called ArtForz in Tenebrix and followed by Fairbrix and Litecoin soon after.[5]