Talk:Password Storage Cheat Sheet

I think, for this cheat-sheet, we should begin by identifying and describing the minimum acceptable mechanisms for password storage (IMO, this is probably still salt+hash) first. Then, describe the additional controls that can be applied to further enhance the protection. --Dan Anderson 17:33, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

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Since the community is focusing more on this page, I think we need a discussion.

A few of the points mentioned on this page are dubious to me :

Recommendation: Make it hard to steal the salt

As far as I know salts are salts, not secrets. They are supposed to be known (in a cryptographic point of view).

• Fixed system salt is a fine practice followed by many,

but does not increase system security since when concatenated with random salts, its just one long salt with less randomness.

• Embedding a portion of the salt on source code, is not much different from the configuration file. Same scenario.
• Generate new salt everytime password changes. That is true, and somehow required. But not to make salt gathering harder.
• Salt in different location: same old

Multiple hashes

Oddly many open source software follow this paradigm, but it's totally irrelevant. As in Merkle's TIme-Memory tradeoff and Rainbow algorithms it is obvious that multiple hashes result in the same chain or another chain of the rainbow, thus don't add a single bit of security. I believe it must be mentioned that this practice is wrong. I have seen numerous OSS use

hash(salt.hash(user.hash(pass)).salt) which is as secure as hash(salt.pass) 

or even less (can be exploited somehow).

I strongly suggest that this page be modified and fixed. If other members approve, please let me know.