I understand the meme: &quot;Never ever roll your own encryption&quot;, but I am stubborn enough to ask: &quot;Why?&quot;.<p>Why use bcrypt over scrypt over pbkdf2? Because crypto experts told you? How could you know it is correct, if you are not able to inspect it? By the amount of people yelling &quot;Use bcrypt&quot;?<p>I know that in crypto you should expect an attacker to be able to read your source code. If you can keep secrets, while your source is out in the open, then it is good crypto. But does that mean you do not need a script-based salt? An attacker which can get into your database, should be able to get code-read access too right? I don&#x27;t think so... Databases are leaked on forums without any trace of the source code&#x2F;app logic. When these people did not roll their own encryption, any attack which is able to beat modern crypto (you will never hear of this, as you are not an expert), could now attack you. They fingerprint the hashes, try to find out which expert roll you used, open their suitcase of crypto breaking tools written by the same expert when she was working for the NSA, under cover of doing a PhD at MIT, and go to town.<p>Don&#x27;t listen to me, because I am not an crypto authority, but do roll your own encryption: Give your own twist to it. That is security by obfuscation, and would not put all eggs in the same basket. An attacker has to be able to break your custom scheme now, for every different site&#x2F;database attacked. It could be simple, it could be near perfect, but it won&#x27;t be as simple as pressing a button on the &quot;break modern crypto&quot;-toolkits.<p>If you are one of the few doing this: People will move to less arcane targets in the never-roll-your-own-basket. If you are one of the many doing this, breaking crypto would become an unmanageable field of eggs.<p>If I was a state actor in charge of keeping secrets and breaking crypto, these two memes: &quot;Never roll your own encryption&quot; and &quot;just use bcrypt&quot; are exactly the memes I would propagate to the tech crowd. Even moreso when you can already break bcrypt (or expect to in 5 years and just store everything that looks encrypted with bcrypt) and want to keep your task manageable.<p>AM would be harder to crack if they&#x27;d ROT-13&#x27;d the hashes in the source code.