[aur-dev] [PATCH] Support for salted passwords

[Simo Leone]

I don't want to confuse the issue by introducing another, but while we're on
the topic...

A salt is exactly what Dan described, the salt value is not secret, in fact
it's usually stored right next to the hashed password, or concatenated to
it, in many cases. To put it in a more concrete sense.... let h(x) = hash of
string x , S=a salt value, and P=plaintext password (and ^ is
concatenation). Typically what you store in the database for salted
passwords is : S ^ h(S^P)

There is another related concept, called pepper, which introduces a very
small amount of random data which is not recorded anywhere, but is
concatenated to the salted password prior to hashing. Typically a byte or 4
bits of data are used for this. The idea being that it is relatively
inexpensive for the server to try up to 256 different peppers... but for a
bruteforce attacker it adds 2 orders of magnitude more guessing per
password. For these, what you store in the database is : S ^ h(pepper ^ S ^
P) .

-Simo

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 2:00 PM, Loui Chang <louipc.ist at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon 05 Apr 2010 09:50 -0400, Denis Kobozev wrote:
> >> Here's a patch that adds support for storing salted passwords in the
> >> database. The salt is a random string for each user and is stored
> >> along with the password in the Users table. Salt is created and
> >> password is salted when old users log in. New users get salted
> >> passwords when they register. What do you think?
> >
> > Hi Denis. I thought the idea behind salt is that if someone gets the
> > database, they can't crack the passwords because the salt is secret.
> >
> > If you include the salt in the database, then it wouldn't be much more
> > difficult to crack than the regular password hash, would it?  So how
> > would we go about keeping the salt secret if it's in the same database
> > as the password hashes?
> >
> > I might not fully understand the concept though.
>
> That's not fully correct. Salt is not meant to be secret; it is meant
> to prevent the use of rainbow tables or precomputed hashes.
>
> The idea behind salt in this case is for each user's password to be
> hashed with a different salt. This means if someone is to crack one
> person's password, it doesn't help them at all with the remaining
> passwords in that same database that they got their hands on because
> the salt is unique for every user.
>
> -Dan
>