The scrypt key derivation function and encryption utility

tarsnap.com

14 points·ligouras··6 comments

How it is news? It's been around for years already. Was there a major new development in scrypt that I didn't hear about? Or is this just "let's submit everything tar snap related week" as cperciva put it?

As the guidelines[1] put it:

>What to Submit

>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

[1]http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I find interesting that scrypt asics are on the way: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/20/kncminer-sells-2-million-wo...

They very specifically only handle the very weak (1024, 1, 1) work factor parameterization of scrypt (which AFAIK isn't used by anything other than altcoins) and various workflow optimizations they do internally make them unable to run even those scrypt parameters on arbitrary data.

OK interesting, I didn't realize that the altcoins use scrypt. I remember hearing that Litecoin used a scheme that was supposed to be GPU-resistant, but didn't realize it was scrypt.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin

Looks like there is a Bitcoin variant: http://bitcoinscrypt.org/

Anyone know, how do I determine the version of scrypt currently installed on my system? I've tried various things: -v, -version, --version, man scrypt, strings /usr/local/bin/scrypt... no luck.

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