PHC winner and special recognitions
Jean-Philippe Aumasson
On behalf of the Password Hashing Competition (PHC) panel:
We have selected Argon2 as a basis for the final PHC winner. We will work with the designers to determine the final version, and in particular what tweaks will be made. This discussion will be carried out on the public PHC mailing list (discu...@password-hashing.net), and everyone can contribute.
We will eventually release a final specification and reference C code of the final Argon2-based winner.
Moreover, we give special recognition to the following submissions:
* Catena, for its agile framework approach and side-channel resistance.
* Lyra2, for its elegant sponge-based design, and alternative approach to side-channel resistance.
* Makwa, for its unique delegation feature and its factoring-based security.
* yescrypt, for its rich feature set and easy upgrade path from scrypt.
We will also endorse those four algorithms for scenarios in which their unique capabilities are essential, although the Argon2-based winner will be our main recommendation. Like for Argon2, the current versions are not the final versions: their designers are permitted and encouraged to submit improvements to their design, and the panel may ask for specific changes.
We expect the winner and the special recognitions to be finalized by end of Q3 2015.