Scrypt is a password-based key derivation function created by Colin Percival. We use Scrypt in Crypho to generate your initial encryption keys on the fly, both when you first create an account and also every time you log in. Your Scrypt key is re-created every time you log in, and never leaves your browser or phone. And since we use it so often, it is important that the calculations are fast enough.
The algorithm was specifically designed to make it costly to perform large-scale custom hardware attacks by requiring large amounts of memory. While there exist Scrypt implentations for the browser in Javascript, they are extremely slow and impractical for use in mobile apps.
On our way to releasing native mobile apps for Crypho, our development team is hard at work, optimizing our underlying technology. We want to share our progress and contribute back to the open-source community, so we decided to release our Scrypt plugin for iOS and Android under the MIT license. This plugin is for use with Cordova and allows your application to use scrypt on iOS devices using native C code. It is based on libscrypt.
The plugin can be installed via the Cordova command line interface:
Navigate to the root folder for your Cordova/Phonegap project.
Run the command:
cordova plugin add com.crypho.plugins.scrypt
That’s it. For the plugin API, check out the documentation on our github project.