NodeJS: bcrypt vs native crypto

Question

Can someone point out the differences between the two and example situations where use each?

bcrypt looks great.

Answer 1

Use bcrypt where you want to do slow and computationally expensive hashing -- this will generally be for hashes where you really don't want an attacker to be able to reverse the hash, e.g. user passwords. Use native crypto for everything else.

Answer 2

In companion with the @mike-scott's answer, you should prefer bcrypt for password related stuff but still you can use crypto for a wide range of tasks like create random tokens or a HMAC checksum or SHA1/MD5 hashes:

var crypto = require('crypto');   // random tokens var buf = crypto.randomBytes(16).toString('hex'); console.log('Random token of %d bytes in hexadecimal: %s', buf.length, buf); var buf = crypto.randomBytes(16).toString('base64'); console.log('Random token of %d bytes in base 64: %s', buf.length, buf);  // a hashed message authentication checksum (HMAC) using a shared secret key var string = 'My coffee please'; var key = 'Right away sir';  var encrypted = crypto.createHmac('sha1', key).update(string).digest('hex'); console.log('Encrypting "%s" using passphrase "%s": %s', string, key, encrypted);  // a MD5 hash var hashmd5 = crypto.createHash('md5').update(string).digest('hex'); console.log('The MD5 hash of "%s" is %s', string, hashmd5);   // a SHA1 hash var hashsha1 = crypto.createHash('sha1').update(string).digest('hex'); console.log('The SHA1 hash of "%s" is %s', string, hashsha1);