The scrypt package is back on CRAN and I have become the maintainer. The package allow password hashing and verification using Colin Percival’s scrypt scheme. The advantage of the scrypt hashing scheme over other cryptographic hash functions such as SHA is that calculation of the hash takes much more time and memory and a random seed is always used. This makes it much more expensive and time-consuming for attackers to retrieve passwords from hashes obtained through database hacks.
Thanks to RStudio and Andy Kipp in particular for doing all the heavy lifting of creating and writing the package and allowing me to take over maintainership of the CRAN package and the GitHub-repo. Issues and patches welcome!