3 ms·
presumably, the real issue of cracking a hashed password database is that you can then test if the user has the same password for other services (which is a fai
by shabble 17y ago
presumably, the real issue of cracking a hashed password database is that you can then test if the user has the same password for other services (which is a fairly reasonable assumption). Collisions are likely to hinder that goal, by providing multiple 'valid' passwords which may not be the ones originally chosen by the user.
Still, I'm guilty of implementing the brain-dead 'append-a-secret-and-md5-it' scheme, so I'll be using something more sensible in future.
- NateLawson 17y agoI don't know if you've seen it, but I outlined the attacks against H(msg || secret), aka "secret suffix", here: http://rdist.root.org/2009/10/29/stop-using-unsafe-keyed-hashes-use-hmac/ http://rdist.root.org/2009/10/29/stop-using-unsafe-keyed-has... In particular, there are simple attacks when it is used with a hash function that has effective collision attacks, such as MD5.