Sunday, March 24, 2024

Salt (cryptography)

by Hideo Nakamura
Salt (cryptography)

Salt (Cryptography)

Salt is a cryptographic technique used to protect passwords from being exposed. It is used in combination with a hashing algorithm, such as MD5 or SHA-2, to create an encrypted version of the user’s password known as a hash. The salt adds randomness and additional complexity to the password so that it cannot be easily guessed by brute force attacks.

When a user enters their password into an application or website, the system will add the salt before performing its hashing operation on the plaintext value of the password. This means that even if two users have identical passwords, they will still generate different hashes because each one has its own unique salt value added to it first. As long as salts are kept secret and remain unpredictable, attackers won’t be able to guess what any given hash corresponds with without trying every possible combination for each individual user account – making them much less vulnerable than un-salted hashes which can be cracked quickly using rainbow tables or dictionary attacks.

In addition to protecting against brute force attacks, salts also provide protection against precomputed rainbow table lookup attacks where attackers use pre-generated lists of common words and phrases found in dictionaries combined with various numbers and symbols – something which would not be possible if all users were salted differently.

Salt values should never be stored directly in databases but instead randomly generated when needed – typically during registration when creating new accounts – and then discarded after use so that no record remains linking an individual’s username/password pair together within your system.. Salting can also help prevent replay attack vulnerabilities since each transaction needs its own unique salt value associated with it which changes over time making it difficult for hackers to re-use old data they may have intercepted previously.

In conclusion, salting provides an important layer of security for applications storing sensitive information such as passwords or credit card details by adding extra entropy (randomness) into hashes before storage allowing you to store them securely without having worry about someone guessing your encryption keys easily through brute force methods or precomputed rainbow tables lookups . In addition , salting also helps guard against replay attack vulnerability issues since salts must change over time thus preventing hackers from using old data they may have obtained earlier .

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