Install argon2 with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• argon2

Project history

The Password Hashing Competition began after its organizers concluded that modern applications lacked a widely accepted password-hashing standard. The PHC site says the competition ran from 2013 to 2015, received 24 candidates, shortlisted finalists, and selected Argon2 in July 2015.

Argon2 was designed by Alex Biryukov, Daniel Dinu, and Dmitry Khovratovich. The reference repository describes the implementation as C code for the PHC-winning function and documents the Argon2i, Argon2d, and Argon2id variants with time, memory, and parallelism parameters.

RFC 9106, published in September 2021 by the IRTF Crypto Forum Research Group, gave an implementer-oriented description of Argon2 version 1.3 with test vectors. It names Argon2id as the primary variant for implementations of the RFC, with Argon2d and Argon2i as supplementary variants.

Adoption history

Argon2's adoption path moved from competition winner to reference implementation to language bindings and standards-track-adjacent guidance. The PHC site notes bindings for most languages, while RFC 9106 explicitly aims to simplify adoption of Argon2 in Internet protocols.

Package adoption is broad because the reference implementation is useful both directly and indirectly: developers install the CLI to benchmark or generate hashes, while distributions also build `libargon2` for applications, password managers, authentication systems, and language bindings.

How it is used

The `argon2` executable reads the password from standard input and accepts a salt plus flags for variant, iterations, memory, parallelism, hash length, encoded output, raw output, and Argon2 version. The README also documents static and shared libraries for embedding the algorithm in C programs.

For package users, the CLI is often a test and interoperability tool rather than the main production integration. Its encoded hash output is useful for checking parameters and verifying that bindings or server frameworks produce compatible values.

Why package nerds care

Argon2 is package-nerd catnip because a tiny CLI package exposes a major cryptographic primitive with tunable resource costs. It is one of the rare formulae where build flags, SIMD support, libraries, headers, and command-line behavior all matter to downstream consumers.

It also illustrates how security primitives travel through package ecosystems: a competition reference implementation becomes a distro library, then a dependency of higher-level language packages and authentication stacks.

Timeline

• 2013: Password Hashing Competition begins.
• 2014: PHC submissions close and finalists are shortlisted.
• 2015-07: PHC announces Argon2 as the winner.
• 2021-09: RFC 9106 publishes an implementer-oriented Argon2 description and test vectors.

Related projects

• PHC finalists recognized alongside Argon2 included Catena, Lyra2, Makwa, and yescrypt.
• BLAKE2b is the hash function used inside RFC 9106's Argon2 description.

Sources

• https://github.com/P-H-C/phc-winner-argon2
• https://www.password-hashing.net/
• https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9106