Architecture vs Brute-Force: What I Learned Benchmarking KDFs for my Thesis

Choosing a KDF is a trade-off between user verification time and the brute-force cost for an attacker. For my bachelor’s thesis project, Vaulton , I wanted to look past theoretical recommendations and get empirical data on how these algorithms perform across different hardware tiers. I benchmarked Argon2id, Bcrypt, and PBKDF2 across a range of devices from an Intel iGPU to an RTX 5080 to identify their real-world breaking points. This post covers the data from those tests, the hardware bottlenec