PBKDF2 has a major weakness: it is not GPU-resistant and not ASIC-resistant, because it uses relatively small amount of RAM and can be efficiently implemented on GPU (graphics cards) or ASIC (specialized hardware).

Modern key-derivation functions (KDF) like Scrypt and Argon2 are designed to be resistant to dictionary attacks, GPU attacks and ASIC attacks. These functions derive a key (of fixed length) from a password (text) and need a lot memory (RAM), which does not allow fast parallel computations on GPU or ASIC hardware.

Algorithms like Bcrypt, Scrypt and Argon2 are considered more secure KDF functions. They use salt + many iterations + a lot of CPU + a lot of RAM memory and this makes very hard to design a custom hardware to significantly speed up password cracking.

It takes a lot of CPU time to derive the key (e.g. 0.2 sec) + a lot of RAM memory (e.g. 1GB). The calculation process is memory-dependent, so the memory access is the bottleneck of the calculations. Faster RAM access will speed-up the calculations.

When a lot of CPU and RAM is used to derive the key from given password, cracking passwords is slow and inefficient (e.g. 5-10 attempts / second), even when using very good password cracking hardware and software. The goal of the modern KDF functions is to make practically infeasible to perform a brute-force attack to reverse the password from its hash.

Let’s discuss in more details Scrypt, Bcrypt and Argon2.

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