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I'm not talking about a different problem. The bruteforce attack described in the article primarily affects short and dictionary-based passwords. If the passwo
by sordidarray 17y ago
I'm not talking about a different problem.
The bruteforce attack described in the article primarily affects short and dictionary-based passwords. If the password is of sufficient length and complexity (the keyspace is large enough), then bruteforcing becomes computationally infeasible. What the article proposes is, essentially, to use a more computationally expensive algorithm for the benefit of protecting shorter, weaker, passwords. I disagree, and think that increasing the computational cost of the algorithm itself should be used to enhance the security of passwords, rather than having their security depend entirely on that increased cost.
Good passwords stored as a salted hash, or preferably, as an HMAC, are in no way insecure. I feel that implying otherwise is a disservice.
- tptacek 17y agoYou sound like someone who has never run John the Ripper. There clearly are passwords that are impractical to crack. To get one, just "head /dev/random | openssl sha1". Nobody uses passwords like that. They're irrelevant. Instead, the smart ones use passwords that contain a combination of words, numbers, and punctuation. John the Ripper has been cracking those passwords for over a decade. "Salted hashes" are insecure. They'd have been rejected by the FreeBSD team in 1997. If you choose to make a religion out of not using bcrypt, do what the RFC says and use PBKDF.