scrypt

#Scrypt For NodeJS node-scrypt is a native node C++ wrapper for Colin Percival's Scrypt key derivation utility. In short, it is a NodeJS module for what is arguably the most advanced password hash in existence.

##Platforms Supported For Scrypt to work at its best, it needs to have its configuration file custom built for each platform it is installed on. Scrypt's author made Scrypt as a C program. The user of this C program is expected to run a specialised configuration script which will automatically determines the best and most secure way Scrypt can be compiled on that platform. In the past, the output of this configuration script run on a Linux box was used with this module, with other platforms (notably Mac OS) being specially customised.

As of version 1.6.0, this configuration is run automatically before each compile, meaning that this NodeJS Scrypt module will be perfectly tuned to the target operating system. But this is only available for Unix like platforms (Windows support coming soon). It has been tested on Linux, MAC OS and SmartOS (so its ready for Joyent Cloud), but it should workd on any unix type OS. This includes FreeBSD, OpenBSD, SunOS etc. If there is an issue with a particular "unix" like OS, then make contact as it should be very easy to remedy.

##What Is Scrypt? Scrypt is an advanced crypto library used mainly for key derivation (i.e. password authenticator). More information can be found here:

• Tarsnap blurb about Scrypt - Colin Percival (the author of Scrypt) explains a bit about it.
• Academic paper explaining Scrypt.
• Wikipedia Article on Scrypt.

For additional interest, read the article on Wikipedia about the key derivation function.

###The Three Essential Properties Of Password Key Derivation Password key derivation requires three properties:

• The password must not be stored in plaintext. (Therefore it is hashed).
• The password hash must be salted. (Making a rainbow table attack very difficult to pull off).
• The salted hash function must not be fast. (If someone does get hold of the salted hashes, their only option will be brute force which will be very slow).

This Scrypt library automatically handles the above properties. The last item seems strange: Computer scientists are normally pre-occupied with making things fast. Yet it is this property that sets Scrypt apart from the competition. As computers evolve and get more powerful, they are able to attack this property more efficiently. This has become especially apparent with the rise of parallel programming. Scrypt aims to defend against all types of attacks, not matter the attackers power now or in the future.

What This Module Provides

This module implements the following:

• Scrypt password key derivation
  • All three essential properties of password key derivation are implemented (as described above).
  • Both asynchronous and synchronous versions are available.
• Scrypt encryption
  • Both asynchronous and synchronous versions are available.

I suspect Scrypt will be used mainly as a password key derivation function (its author's intended use), but I have also ported the Scrypt encryption and decryption functions as implementations for them were available from the author. Performing Scrypt cryptography is done if you value security over speed. Scrypt is more secure than a vanilla block cipher (e.g. AES) but it is much slower. It is also the basis for the key derivation functions.

The Scrypt Hash Format

I have included this section because I keep being queried about the randomness of this module. Scrypt (and in general, all key derivation functions) store metadata in the header which cannot be encrypted. For example, the random salt needs to be stored un-encrypted in the header. The header information not being encrypted does not mean that security is weakened. What is essential in terms of security is hash integrity (meaning that no part of the hashed output can be changed) and that the original password cannot be determined from the hashed output (this is why you are using Scrypt - because it does this in a good way). Scrypt uses a normal MAC to ensure integrity, but it derives it in a funky way based on its unique properties.

Every Scrypt header starts with the word "scrypt". The reason for this is that I am following Colin Percival's (Scrypt's author) reference implementation whereby he starts off each hash this way. Next comes information regarding how the hash will be constructed (see the three tweakable inputs below). Users of Scrypt normally do not change this information once it is settled upon (hence this will also look the same for each hash). Once the hash has been produced, the result is base64 encoded to ensure maximum portability.

Taking the above paragraph into account, note the following: The base64 encoding for the word "scrypt" is c2NyeXB0. So at the very least, every hash derived using this module should start with c2NyeXB0. Next comes metadata that normally does not change once settled upon (so it should also look the same). Only then does the random salt get added along with the derived hashed password.

To illustrate with an example, I have hashed two password: password1 and password2. Their outputs are as follows:

password1
c2NyeXB0AAwAAAAIAAAAAcQ0zwp7QNLklxCn14vB75AYWDIrrT9I/7F9+lVGBfKN/1TH2hs
/HboSy1ptzN0YzHJhC7PZIEPQzf2nuoaqVZg8VkKEJlo8/QaH7qjU2VwB

password2
c2NyeXB0AAwAAAAIAAAAAZ/+bp8gWcTZgEC7YQZeLLyxFeKRRdDkwbaGeFC0NkdUr/YFAWY
/UwdOH4i/PxW48fXeXBDOTvGWtS3lLUgzNM0PlJbXhMOGd2bke0PvTSnW

As one can see from the above example, both hashes start off by looking similar (they both start with c2NyeXB0AAwAAAAIAAAAA - as explained above), but afterwards, things change very rapidly. In fact, I hashed the password password1 again:

password1
c2NyeXB0AAwAAAAIAAAAATpP+fdQAryDiRmCmcoOrZa2mZ049KdbA/ofTTrATQQ+m
0L/gR811d0WQyip6p2skXVEMz2+8U+xGryFu2p0yzfCxYLUrAaIzaZELkN2M6k0

Compare this hash to the one above. Even though they start off looking similar, their outputs are vastly different (even though it is the same password being hashed). This is because of the random salt that has been added, ensuring that no two hashes will ever be indentical, even if the password that is being hashed is the same.

For those that are curious or paranoid, please look at how the hash is both produced and verified (you are going to need some knowledge of the C language for this).

##Why Use Scrypt? It is probably the most advanced key derivation function available. This is is quote taken from a comment in hacker news:

Passwords hashed with scrypt with sufficiently-high strength values (there are 3 tweakable input numbers) are fundamentally impervious to being cracked. I use the word "fundamental" in the literal sense, here; even if you had the resources of a large country, you would not be able to design any hardware (whether it be GPU hardware, custom-designed hardware, or otherwise) which could crack these hashes. Ever. (For sufficiently-small definitions of "ever". At the very least "within your lifetime"; probably far longer.)

The three tweakable inputs mentioned above are as follows (quoting from Scrypt's author Colin Percival):

maxtime

maxtime will instruct scrypt to spend at most maxtime seconds computing the derived encryption key from the password; [If using scrypt] for encryption, this value will determine how secure the encrypted data is, while for decryption this value is used as an upper limit (if scrypt detects that it would take too long to decrypt the data, it will exit with an error message).

maxmemfrac

maxmemfrac instructs scrypt to use at most the specified fraction of the available RAM for computing the derived encryption key. For encryption, increasing this value might increase the security of the encrypted data, depending on the maxtime value; for decryption, this value is used as an upper limit and may cause scrypt to exit with an error.

maxmem

maxmem instructs scrypt to use at most the specified number of bytes of RAM when computing the derived encryption key.

A Note On How Memory Is Calculated: maxmem is often defaulted to 0. This does not mean that 0 RAM is used. Instead, memory used is calculated like so (quote from Colin Percival):

the system [will use] the amount of RAM which [is] specified [as the] fraction of the available RAM, but no more than maxmem, and no less than 1MiB

Therefore at the very least, 1MiB of ram will be used.

###The Three Tweakable Inputs Note: This is a very important section to understand. The three tweakable inputs mentioned above are actually just human understandable inputs into a translation function that produces the inputs required for the internal scrypt cryptographic function. These inputs (as defined in the scrypt paper) are as follows:

1. N - general work factor, iteration count.
2. r - blocksize in use for underlying hash; fine-tunes the relative memory-cost.
3. p - parallelization factor; fine-tunes the relative cpu-cost.

Values for maxtime, maxmemfrac and maxmem are translated into the above values, which are then fed to the Scrypt function. The translation function also takes into account the CPU and Memory capabilities of a machine. Therefore values of N, r and p may differ for different machines that have different specs.

Pros And Cons

Here are some pros and cons for using it:

###Pros

• The Scrypt algorithm has been published by IETF as an Internet Draft and is thus on track to becoming a standard. See here for the draft.
• It is being actively used in production at Tarsnap.
• It is much more secure than bcrypt.
• It is designed to be future proof against attacks with future (and more advanced) hardware.
• It is designed to defend against large scale custom hardware attacks.
• It is production ready.
• There is a Scrypt library for most major scripting languages (Python, Ruby etc). Now this module provides the library for NodeJS :)

I will end this section with a quote from Colin Percival (author of Scrypt):

We estimate that on modern (2009) hardware, if 5 seconds are spent computing a derived key, the cost of a hardware brute-force attack against scrypt is roughly 4000 times greater than the cost of a similar attack against bcrypt (to find the same password), and 20000 times greater than a similar attack against PBKDF2.

###Cons There is just one con I can think of: It is a relatively new library (only been around since 2009). Cryptographers don't really like new libraries for production deployment as it has not been battle tested. That being said, it is being actively used in Tarsnap (as mentioned above) and the author is very active.

#Security Issues/Concerns As should be the case with any security tool, this library should be scrutinized by anyone using it. If you find or suspect an issue with the code- please bring it to my attention and I'll spend some time trying to make sure that this tool is as secure as possible.

#Installation Instruction ##From NPM

npm install scrypt

##From Source You will need node-gyp to get this to work (install it if you don't have it: npm install -g node-gyp):

git clone https://github.com/barrysteyn/node-scrypt.git
cd node-scrypt
node-gyp configure build

#Testing Testing is accomplished with the node tap module. ##If installed via NPM To test, go to the folder where Scrypt was installed, and type:

cd node_modules/scrypt
npm install
node tests/scrypt-tests

##If installed via source Go to the folder where Scrypt was installed and type:

cd node-scrypt
npm install
node tests/scrypt-tests

#Hash Info All Scrypt output is encoded into Base64 using René Nyffenegger library. The character sets that compromises all output are ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/.

#Usage There are both asynchronous and synchronous functions available. It is highly recommended not to use the synchronous version unless necessary due to the fact that Node's event loop will be blocked for the duration of these purposefully slow functions.

##Asynchronous Authentication For interactive authentication, set maxtime to 0.1 - 100 milliseconds.

###To create a password hash

var scrypt = require("scrypt");
var password = "This is a password";
var maxtime = 0.1;

scrypt.passwordHash(password, maxtime, function(err, pwdhash) {
    if (!err) {
        //pwdhash should now be stored in the database
    }
});

Note: maxmem and maxmemfrac can also be passed to hash function. If they are not passed, then maxmem defaults to 0 and maxmemfrac defaults to 0.5. If these values are to be passed, then they must be passed after maxtime and before the callback function like so:

var scrypt = require("scrypt");
var password = "This is a password";
var maxtime = 0.1;
var maxmem = 0, maxmemfrac = 0.5;

scrypt.passwordHash(password, maxtime, maxmem, maxmemfrac, function(err, pwdhash) {
    if (!err) {
        //pwdhash should now be stored in the database
    }
});

###To verify a password hash

var scrypt = require("scrypt");
var password = "This is a password";
var hash; //This should be obtained from the database

scrypt.verifyHash(hash, password, function(err, result) {
    if (!err)
        return result; //Will be True
    
    return False;    
});

##Synchronous Authentication Again, for interactive authentication, set maxtime to 0.1 - 100 milliseconds.

###To create a password hash

var scrypt = require("scrypt");
var password = "This is a password";
var maxtime = 0.1;

var hash = scrypt.passwordHashSync(password, maxtime);

Note: maxmem and maxmemfrac can also be passed to hash function. If they are not passed, then maxmem defaults to 0 and maxmemfrac defaults to 0.5. If these values are to be passed, then they must be passed after maxtime and before the callback function like so:

var scrypt = require("scrypt");
var password = "This is a password";
var maxtime = 0.1;
var maxmem = 0, maxmemfrac = 0.5;

var hash = scrypt.passwordHashSync(password, maxtime, maxmem, maxmemfrac);

###To verify a password hash

var scrypt = require("scrypt");
var password = "This is a password";
var hash; //This should be obtained from the database

var result = scrypt.verifyHashSync(hash, password);

Note: There is no error description for the synchronous version. Therefore, if an error occurs, it will just return its result as false.

##Asynchronous Encryption and Decryption

var scrypt = require("scrypt");
var message = "Hello World";
var password = "Pass";
var maxtime = 1.0;

scrypt.encrypt(message, password, maxtime, function(err, cipher) {
    console.log(cipher);
    scrypt.decrypt(cipher, password, maxtime, function(err, msg) {
        console.log(msg);
    });
});

Note that maxmem and maxmemfrac can also be passed to the functions. If they are not passed, then maxmem defaults to 0 and maxmemfrac defaults to 0.5. If these values are to be passed, then they must be passed after maxtime and before the callback function like so:

var scrypt = require("scrypt");
var message = "Hello World";
var password = "Pass";
var maxtime = 1.0;
var maxmem = 1; //Defaults to 0 if not set
var maxmemfrac = 1.5; //Defaults to 0.5 if not set

scrypt.encrypt(message, password, maxtime, maxmem, maxmemfrac, function(err, cipher) {
    console.log(cipher);
    scrypt.decrypt(cipher, password, maxtime, maxmem, maxmemfrac, function(err, msg) {
        console.log(msg);
    });
});

##Synchronous Encryption and Decryption

var scrypt = require("scrypt");
var message = "Hello World";
var password = "Pass";
var maxtime = 1.0;

var cipher = scrypt.encryptSync(message, password, maxtime);
var plainText = scrypt.decryptSync(cipher, password, maxtime);

Note: that maxmem and maxmemfrac can also be passed to the functions. If they are not passed, then maxmem defaults to 0 and maxmemfrac defaults to 0.5. If these values are to be passed, then they must be passed after maxtime and before the callback function like so:

var scrypt = require("scrypt");
var message = "Hello World";
var password = "Pass";
var maxtime = 1.0;
var maxmem = 1; //Defaults to 0 if not set
var maxmemfrac = 1.5; //Defaults to 0.5 if not set

var cipher = scrypt.encryptSync(message, password, maxtime, maxmem, maxmemfrac);
var plainText = scrypt.decryptSync(cipher, password, maxtime, maxmem, maxmemfrac);

#Api

##Authentication

###Asynchronous

• passwordHash(password, maxtime, maxmem, maxmemfrac, callback_function)
  • password - [REQUIRED] - a password string.
  • maxtime - [REQUIRED] - a decimal (double) representing the maxtime in seconds for running Scrypt. Use 0.1 (100 milliseconds) for interactive logins.
  • maxmem - [OPTIONAL] - instructs Scrypt to use the specified number of bytes of RAM (default 0).
  • maxmemfrac - [OPTIONAL] - instructs Scrypt to use the specified fracion of RAM (defaults 0.5).
  • callback_function - [REQUIRED] - a callback function that will handle processing when result is ready.
• verifyHash(hash, password, callback_function)
  • hash - [REQUIRED] - the password created with the above passwordHash function.
  • password - [REQUIRED] - a password string.
  • callback_function - [REQUIRED] - a callback function that will handle processing when result is ready.

###Synchronous

• passwordHashSync(password, maxtime, maxmem, maxmemfrac)
  • password - [REQUIRED] - a password string.
  • maxtime - [REQUIRED] - a decimal (double) representing the maxtime in seconds for running Scrypt. Use 0.1 (100 milliseconds) for interactive logins.
  • maxmem - [OPTIONAL] - instructs Scrypt to use the specified number of bytes of RAM (default 0).
  • maxmemfrac - [OPTIONAL] - instructs Scrypt to use the specified fracion of RAM (defaults 0.5).
• verifyHashSync(hash, password)
  • hash - [REQUIRED] - the password created with the above passwordHash function.
  • password - [REQUIRED] - a password string.

##Encryption/Decryption

###Asynchronous

• encrypt(message, password, maxtime, maxmem, maxmemfrac, callback_function)
  • message - [REQUIRED] - the message data to be encrypted.
  • password - [REQUIRED] - a password string.
  • maxtime - [REQUIRED] - a decimal (double) representing the maxtime in seconds for running Scrypt.
  • maxmem - [OPTIONAL] - instructs Scrypt to use the specified number of bytes of RAM (default 0).
  • maxmemfrac - [OPTIONAL] - instructs Scrypt to use the specified fracion of RAM (defaults 0.5).
  • callback_function - [REQUIRED] - a callback function that will handle processing when result is ready.
• decrypt(cipher, password, maxtime, maxmem, maxmemfrac, callback_function)
  • cipher - [REQUIRED] - the cipher to be decrypted.
  • password - [REQUIRED] - a password string.
  • maxtime - [REQUIRED] - a decimal (double) representing the maxtime in seconds for running Scrypt.
  • maxmem - [OPTIONAL] - instructs Scrypt to use the specified number of bytes of RAM (default 0).
  • maxmemfrac - [OPTIONAL] - instructs Scrypt to use the specified fracion of RAM (defaults 0.5).
  • callback_function - [REQUIRED] - a callback function that will handle processing when result is ready.

###Synchronous

• encryptSync(message, password, maxtime, maxmem, maxmemfrac)
  • message - [REQUIRED] - the message data to be encrypted.
  • password - [REQUIRED] - a password string.
  • maxtime - [REQUIRED] - a decimal (double) representing the maxtime in seconds for running Scrypt.
  • maxmem - [OPTIONAL] - instructs Scrypt to use the specified number of bytes of RAM (default 0).
  • maxmemfrac - [OPTIONAL] - instructs Scrypt to use the specified fracion of RAM (defaults 0.5).
• decryptSync(cipher, password, maxtime, maxmem, maxmemfrac)
  • cipher - [REQUIRED] - the cipher to be decrypted.
  • password - [REQUIRED] - a password string.
  • maxtime - [REQUIRED] - a decimal (double) representing the maxtime in seconds for running Scrypt.
  • maxmem - [OPTIONAL] - instructs Scrypt to use the specified number of bytes of RAM (default 0).
  • maxmemfrac - [OPTIONAL] - instructs Scrypt to use the specified fracion of RAM (defaults 0.5).

#Credits The Scrypt library is Colin Percival's Scrypt project. This includes the encryption/decryption functions which are basically just wrappers into this library.

The password hash and verify functions are also very heavily influenced by the Scrypt source code, with most functionality being copied from various placed within Scrypt.

#Contributors

• René Nyffenegger - produced original Base64 encoding code.
• Kelvin Wong - MAC OS compilation and testing.
• Tamas Geschitz - SmartOS and MAC OS testing