yescrypt - scalable KDF and password hashing scheme
yescrypt is a password-based key derivation function (KDF) and password hashing scheme.
It builds upon Colin Percival's scrypt.
This implementation is able to compute native yescrypt hashes as well as classic scrypt.
For a related proof-of-work (PoW) scheme, see yespower instead.
Follow this link for information on verifying the signatures.
Please check out our
presentation slides on yescrypt.
(Some of the detail on the last few slides pertains to yescrypt 0.9.x and is no longer valid for yescrypt 1.0+,
but overall this slide deck still applies.)
We can help you integrate yescrypt into your software or online services.
Please check out our services.
Like it or not, password authentication remains relevant (including as
one of several authentication factors), password hash database leaks
happen, the leaks are not always detected and fully dealt with right
away, and even once they are many users' same or similar passwords
reused elsewhere remain exposed. To mitigate these risks (as well as
those present in other scenarios where password-based key derivation or
password hashing is relevant), computationally expensive (bcrypt,
PBKDF2, etc.) and more recently also memory-hard (scrypt,
Argon2, etc.)
password hashing schemes have been introduced. Unfortunately, at high
target throughput and/or low target latency their memory usage is
unreasonably low, up to the point where they're not obviously better
than the much older bcrypt (considering attackers with pre-existing
hardware). This is a primary drawback that yescrypt addresses.
Most notable for large-scale deployments is yescrypt's optional
initialization and reuse of a large lookup table, typically occupying
at least tens of gigabytes of RAM and essentially forming a
site-specific ROM. This limits attackers' use of pre-existing hardware
such as botnet nodes.
yescrypt's other changes from scrypt additionally slow down GPUs and to a lesser extent FPGAs and ASICs
even when its memory usage is low and even when there's no ROM,
and provide extra knobs and built-in features.
Technically, yescrypt is the most scalable password hashing scheme so
far, providing near-optimal security from offline password cracking
across the whole range from kilobytes to terabytes and beyond. However,
the price for this is complexity, and we recognize that complexity is a
major drawback of any software. Thus, at this time we focus on
large-scale deployments, where the added complexity is relatively small
compared to the total complexity of the authentication service setup.
For smaller deployments, bcrypt with its simplicity and existing library support is a reasonable short-term choice
(although we made progress towards more efficient
FPGA attacks on bcrypt under a separate project).
We might introduce a cut-down yescrypt-lite later or/and yescrypt might become part of more standard or popular libraries
(and it is already in
libxcrypt), making it more suitable for smaller deployments as well.
Performance
Please see the PERFORMANCE file inside the yescrypt distribution for
example setup and benchmarks relevant to the mass user authentication
use case.
The test system is a server (kindly provided by Packet) with dual
Xeon Gold 5120 CPUs (2.2 GHz, turbo to up to 3.2 GHz) and 384 GiB RAM
(12x DDR4-2400 ECC Reg). These CPUs have 14 cores and 6 memory channels
each, for a total of 28 physical cores, 56 logical CPUs (HT is enabled),
and 12 memory channels.
Some highlights: initialization of a 368 GiB ROM takes 22 seconds (to be
done on server bootup), and while using the ROM we're able to compute
over 21k, over 10k, or around 1200 hashes per second with
per-hash RAM usage of 1.4375 MiB, 2.875 MiB, or 23 MiB, respectively.
When not using a ROM, we're able to compute over 21k, over 10k,
or around 1200 hashes per second with per-hash RAM usage of 2 MiB, 4 MiB,
or 32 MiB, respectively.
Comparison to scrypt and Argon2
yescrypt's advantages:
Greater resistance to offline attacks (increasing attacker's cost at same defender's cost)
yescrypt supports optional ROM for protection from use of botnet nodes (and other relatively small memory devices)
yescrypt has a dependency not only on RAM and maybe ROM, but also on fast on-die local memory (such as a CPU's L1 or L2 cache), which provides bcrypt-like anti-GPU properties even at very low per-hash RAM sizes (where scrypt and Argon2 are more likely to lose to bcrypt in terms of GPU attack speed) and even without ROM
yescrypt and scrypt currently have little low-level parallelism within processing of a block (yescrypt allows for tuning this later, scrypt does not), whereas Argon2 has a fixed and currently commonly excessive amount of such parallelism, which may be extracted to speed up e.g. GPU attacks through use of more computing resources per the same total memory size due to each hash computation's memory needs being split between 32 threads (yescrypt currently has four 16-byte lanes that can be processed in parallel within a 64-byte sub-block before running into a data dependency for the next sub-block, whereas Argon2 allows for parallel processing of eight 128-byte chunks within a 1 KiB block with only two synchronization points for the entire block, as well as of four 32-byte parts of the 128-byte chunks with only two more synchronization points for the entire 1 KiB block)
yescrypt uses computation latency hardening based on integer multiplication and local memory access speed, which ties its per-hash RAMs up for a guaranteed minimum amount of time regardless of possibly much higher memory bandwidth on the attacker's hardware, whereas Argon2 uses only the multiplications and performs 6 times fewer of those sequentially (96 sequential multiplications per 1 KiB for yescrypt vs. 16 per 1 KiB for Argon2, providing correspondingly different minimum time guarantees) and scrypt does not use this technique at all (but is no worse than Argon2 in this respect anyway due to having less low-level parallelism)
yescrypt and Argon2 are time-memory trade-off (TMTO) resistant (thus, computing them in less memory takes disproportionately longer), whereas scrypt is deliberately TMTO-friendly (and moreover, computing it in less memory takes up to 4x less than proportionately longer)
Extra optional built-in features
Hash encryption so that the hashes are not crackable without the key (to be stored separately)
Hash upgrade to higher settings without knowledge of password (temporarily removed from 1.0, to be re-added later)
SCRAM-like client-side computation of challenge responses (already part of the algorithm, not yet exposed via the API)
yescrypt's and Argon2's running time is tunable on top of memory usage and parallelism, unlike in scrypt's
Cryptographic security provided by NIST-approved primitives
(ye)scrypt's cryptographic security is provided by SHA-256, HMAC, and PBKDF2, which are NIST-approved and time-tested (the rest of yescrypt's processing, while most crucial for its offline attack resistance properties, provably does not affect its basic cryptographic hash properties), whereas Argon2 relies on the newer BLAKE2 (either choice is just fine for security, but use of approved algorithms may sometimes be required for compliance)
SHA-256, HMAC, PBKDF2, and scrypt are usable from the same codebase
yescrypt's drawbacks:
Complex (higher risk of human error occurring and remaining unnoticed for long)
Cache-timing unsafe (like bcrypt, scrypt, and Argon2d, but unlike Argon2i)
Not the PHC winner (Argon2 is), but is a finalist with "special recognition"
yescrypt's complexity is related to its current primary target use case (mass user authentication)
and is relatively small compared to the total complexity of the authentication service, so the risk may be justified
Cache-timing safety is unimportant on dedicated servers, is mitigated for some use cases and threat models by proper use of salts, and is fully achieved in Argon2 only in its 2i flavor and only through reduction of resistance to the usual offline attacks compared to the 2d flavor
yescrypt's single-threaded memory filling speed on an otherwise idle machine and at our currently recommended settings is lower than Argon2's, but that's a result of our deliberate tuning (there's a knob to change that, but we don't recommend doing so) preventing yescrypt from bumping into memory access speed prematurely, and is irrelevant for determining server request rate capacity and maximum response latency where multiple instances or threads would be run (under that scenario, the algorithms deliver similar speeds)
yescrypt has been designed and currently configured to fit the SSE2 and NEON instruction sets and 128-bit SIMD perfectly, not benefiting from AVX's 3-register instructions (unlike classic scrypt, which doesn't fit SSE2 as perfectly and thus benefits from AVX and XOP) nor from AVX2's and AVX-512's wider SIMD (although it can be reconfigured for wider SIMD later), whereas Argon2 significantly benefits from those at least when running fewer threads or concurrent instances than are supported by the hardware (yet yescrypt's SSE2 code is competitive with Argon2's AVX2 code under full server load)
yescrypt vs. Argon2 benchmarks are further complicated by these two schemes having different minimum amount of processing over memory (yescrypt's is 4/3 of Argon2's), and thus different average memory usage (5/8 of peak for yescrypt t=0 vs. 1/2 of peak for Argon2 t=1), which needs to be taken into account
scrypt benchmarks are also different in amount of processing over memory (twice Argon2's minimum) and average memory usage (3/4 of peak), but that's even further complicated by scrypt's TMTO-friendliness providing up to a 4x advantage to some attackers
A note on cryptocurrencies
For historical reasons, multiple CPU mining focused cryptocurrencies use yescrypt 0.5'ish as their proof-of-work (PoW) scheme.
We currently have a separate project for the PoW use case: yespower.
Thus, rather than misuse yescrypt 1.0+ for PoW, those and other projects are advised to use yespower 1.0+ instead.
