PBKDF2 is a secure password hashing algorithm that uses the techniques of "key strengthening" to make the complexity of a brute-force attack arbitrarily high. PBKDF2 uses any other cryptographic hash or cipher (by convention, usually HMAC-SHA1, but 'Crypt::PBKDF2' is fully pluggable), and allows for an arbitrary number of iterations of the hashing function, and a nearly unlimited output hash size (up to 2**32 - 1 times the size of the output of the backend hash). The hash is salted, as any password hash should be, and the salt may also be of arbitrary size.