Balloon hashing is a key derivation function presenting proven memory-hard password-hashing and modern design. It was created by Dan Boneh, Henry Corrigan-Gibbs (both at Stanford University) and Stuart Schechter (Microsoft Research) in 2016.[1][2] It is a recommended function in NIST password guidelines.[3]
The authors claim that Balloon:
Balloon is compared by its authors with Argon2, a similarly performing algorithm.[1]
There are three steps in the algorithm:[1]