Re: [Discussion] Changing PASSWORD_DEFAULT to Argon2

Hi Tim, On Mon, Sep 21, 2026 at 8:11 PM Tim Düsterhus <tim@bastelstu.be> wrote: > > 500ms is insanely long for interactive authentication. And the memory > cost in that example benchmark is indeed scary when you consider that > PHP ships with a default memory_limit of 128 MB (though it seems that > the Argon2 hashing is not included in the memory_limit accounting). That's missing the point I was making ... The cited 1000ms had at least halved in 4 years (if the screenshot was up to date at the time), and it's been an additional 3 years since. Hashcat didn't even ship with Argon2 support until last year, so verifying the benchmarks (if they are direct and not math projections) was extremely hard. PHP's defaults are m=64mb,t=4,p=1, which averages around 240ms on my 10y laptop, same as bcrypt cost 12. When Hashcat 7 did release last year it came with a benchmark for m=64mb,t=3,p=1 yielding around 1.7k hashes per second: https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=hashcat For bcrypt cost=12 I've seen rates ranging from 1k to 2k H/s using the same GPU model (some variance in setups/optimizations I guess). All of this is comparing ceilings well beyond safe recommendations, somewhat like top speeds on a racing car; there's a solid argument that e.g. 48mb or even 32mb is plenty enough. But anyway, if Jakub's comment was describing the status-quo, it's just not happening. Cheers, Andrey.