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An additional thought: Even if you can't crack a bcrypt hash (say they picked a sufficiently complex password), you can still verify it given a particular plain
by ZoFreX 10y ago
An additional thought: Even if you can't crack a bcrypt hash (say they picked a sufficiently complex password), you can still verify it given a particular plaintext password. So you could go through a database and discover users that are using the same password in that DB as they are on some other sites that leaked weaker hashes, for example. If the hashes you get access to are encrypted, you can't even verify them given a known plaintext password. It's a marginal, but not non-existent improvement.
- LgWoodenBadger 10y agoI'm pretty sure this is what a salt prevents.
- ZoFreX 10y agoNo - salts mean that the same password hashed twice will give different results, which prevents the use of lookup tables, and trivially discovering users with the same passwords. Given a hash and a salt, you can still verify what the password was.
- crpatino 10y agoThere is no reason to believe that other sites will pick the same salt for each user, unless they are deriving it from either the password itself, the user id, or some other piece of user private info; which would be bad form anyways. If you are not using salt, you are vulnerable to rainbow attacks within the same database.