History
The first deliberately slow password-based key derivation function was called "CRYPT" and was published by Robert Morris in 1978 for encrypting Unix passwords. It used an iteration count of 25, a 12-bit salt and a variant of DES as the sub-function. (DES proper was avoided in an attempt to frustrate attacks using standard DES hardware.) It also limited passwords to a maximum of eight ASCII characters. While it seemed a great advance at the time, CRYPT(3) is now considered inadequate. The iteration count, designed for the PDP-11 era, is too low, 12 bits of salt is an inconvenience but does not stop precomputed dictionary attacks, and the 8 character limit prevents the use of stronger passphrases.
Modern password-based key derivation functions, such as PBKDF2 (specified in RFC 2898), use a cryptographic hash, such as MD5 or SHA1, more salt (e.g. 64 bits) and a high iteration count (often 1000 or more). There have been proposals, such as scrypt to use algorithms that require large amounts of computer memory and other computing resources to make custom hardware attacks more difficult to mount.
In 2009, a new key strengthening algorithm, scrypt, was introduced that demands large amounts of memory to evaluate, limiting the use of custom, highly parallel hardware to speed up key testing.
Read more about this topic: Key Stretching
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)