Scrypt
| General | |
|---|---|
| Designers | Colin Percival |
| First published | 2009 |
| Cipher detail | |
| Digest sizes | variable |
| Block sizes | variable |
| Rounds | variable |
In cryptography, scrypt (pronounced "ess crypt") is a password-based key derivation function created by Colin Percival in March 2009, originally for the Tarsnap online backup service. 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. 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.