One Little Method Secures You On-line, Your CryptoWallet, And Your Wi-fi: Meet The Tortoise

There’s one little cybersecurity method that protects you on-line, your Crypto Wallet and your wi-fi: PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2). And, it loves being slow … in fact, the slower the better!!!!

PBKDF2 is a method used to take an input — such as random data or a passphrase — and then converts it into an encryption key of a certain size. This is then typically used with AES encryption, in order to secure the data. A 256-bit key has 32 bytes, and a 128-bit key has 16 bytes.

But there are many other hashing methods, such as MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, and so on. So what makes PBKDF2 so special? Well, it is its slowness which is a good feature when someone is trying to crack your crypto wallet or your wi-fi. For this we have a number of rounds that we hash for … and the more the rounds, the longer it will take. Typically we use more than 2,000 rounds for a robust password, and where only a few thousand passwords can be tried per second — rather than billions for SHA-256. This slowness makes it costly to crack, and you would require GPU arrays to crack the simplest of password, and which will be costing in terms of the electricity these use. PBKDF2 also contains a salt value, and which makes it robust against rainbow tables.