Bcrypt & Argon2 Hash Generator (Demo)
A demonstration tool to show how modern password hashing algorithms like Bcrypt and Argon2 work. For educational purposes only.
For Educational Use Only
Storing user passwords in plain text is a critical security vulnerability. If a database is breached, all user passwords would be exposed. Instead, secure applications use strong, one-way hashing algorithms to store a 'hash' of the password. When a user logs in, the password they enter is hashed using the same algorithm, and the result is compared to the stored hash. This tool demonstrates the two leading algorithms for this purpose: Bcrypt and Argon2.
A salt is a unique, randomly generated string that is added to each password before it is hashed. The salt is then stored alongside the hash in the database. This is a critical security step because it ensures that even if two users have the same password, their stored hashes will be completely different. This defeats 'rainbow table' attacks, where attackers use pre-computed tables of hashes for common passwords.
Bcrypt
Bcrypt has been the industry standard for many years. Its key feature is an adjustable 'cost' or 'work factor', which allows developers to intentionally make it slower. As computers get faster, the cost can be increased to ensure that brute-force attacks remain impractically time-consuming.
Argon2
Argon2 won the Password Hashing Competition in 2015 and is now widely considered the best-in-class algorithm. It is not only adjustable for time cost (like Bcrypt) but is also 'memory-hard'. This means it requires a significant amount of RAM to compute, making it highly resistant to attacks from specialized hardware like GPUs and ASICs, which often have limited memory.
Bcrypt and Argon2 are designed to be slow and resource-intensive to make them secure. Running these algorithms in a web browser would be extremely inefficient and could freeze the user's page for several seconds. This tool simulates the *output format* of these hashes to help you understand what they look like and how salts are incorporated, but it does not perform the actual, secure hashing computation.