The Importance of Hashing Passwords, Part 4: The Hardware Threat

The third part of this series presented PBKDF2 as a modern key derivation and password hashing algorithm. But PBKDF2 has its limitations; for best protection against password cracking the iteration count (defining the computing power needed to hash a password) should be chosen as high as possible. On the other hand, a higher iteration count also means that a login of a regular user will be slower. The maximal time users are prepared to wait for a successfull login will limit the maximal iteration count which you can choose for the available computing power.

For some time we could at least assume that all but the most resourcefull attackers will have roughly the same computing power at hand as the defenders have on their login servers. An attacker might be able to set up (and finance) hardware to hash passwords 100 or even 1000 times faster than a server, but this could be compensated for by a sufficiently high iteration count. However, by using hardware specialized towards massively parallel execution of hashing operations the relation of the average servers and the potential attackers “hashing power” shifted more and more to the advantage of the attacker. Hashing algorithms like the scrypt algorithm presented in this Blog article attempt to shift this relation back in favor of the defender.

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The Importance of Hashing Passwords, Part 1: Cryptographic Hashes

Many applications store passwords for user authentication. Using an appropriate password hashing algorithm can efficiently protect the stored passwords even when the persisted password hashes get stolen by an attacker.

Unfortunately many developers assigned with the task to implement a persistent password storage lack the necessary cryptographical background knowledge to choose a strong password hashing algorithm, often leading to passwords stored in plain or hashed with weak algorithms such as a secure hash algorithm without any salt or iterations.

This article aims to help the cryptographically unencumbered developers to make the right choice when hashing user passwords. The first part will start with a closer look on the goal we try to achieve, and then examine the secure hash functions which build the core of every password hashing. The following parts will show how to further strengthen a raw hash function against cracking attacks, finally leading to the state-of-the-art algorithms PBKDF2 and scrypt.

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