Is Argon2 better than Bcrypt?
The article compares Argon2 and Bcrypt password hashing algorithms, explaining their differences in security, memory usage, and resistance to GPU and ASIC attacks. It concludes that Argon2 is generally more secure and modern than Bcrypt, but Bcrypt remains a strong choice for many applications.
Background
- Argon2 and bcrypt are **password-hashing algorithms** — not encryption algorithms. They are designed to be deliberately slow and resource-intensive so that if a database of hashed passwords is stolen, attackers cannot quickly guess the original passwords by brute force. The "cost" of each algorithm is a tunable parameter that increases the time and memory required to compute a single hash. The question of which is "better" matters because a poor choice can result in either a false sense of security (using salt alone without enough cost) or an unnecessarily slow user login experience, and because the space is crowded with algorithms (MD5, SHA-1, PBKDF2, bcrypt, scrypt, Argon2) that are not interchangeable.