What is PHC?

PHC, which likely stands for Password Hashing Competition, refers to a public competition held to select a new password hashing algorithm. The goal of such competitions is to identify a robust and secure algorithm that can effectively protect user passwords from various attacks, such as brute-force and dictionary attacks. The selected algorithm becomes a standard for password storage, replacing older, less secure methods. It ensures better security when authenticating users by making it computationally expensive for attackers to reverse the hashing process and obtain the original passwords, even if the password database is compromised.