Created by Colin Percival, it’s a password based key deciphering or interpretation algorithm. It was originally used to make large scale hardware attacks unviable. Authorized users need to perform only once while authentication, however a brute force attacker will need to perform the operation billion times within the given time interval making the attack unviable and unsuccessful.

Scrypt algorithm has been designed in such a way that it uses large amount of memory unlike other password Key Derivation Functions (KDF) like PBKDF2.