3 ms·

It would be better to use more hashing rounds as changing the algorithm itself doesn't require more computational effort from the attacker.

• nickpsecurity 10y ago
  I argued with that since cryptographers first told me about it. Ludicrous concept. The goal is to eliminate brute force attacks by making the process inherently slow. That technique starts with something inherently ultra-fast that everyone is trying to speed up and hardware accelerate then iterates it a bit. Better concept to get a slow process is design an algorithm that is inherently slow and hard to speed up, esp requiring many memory accesses. My hack, aimed at defeating FPGA's, was putting a random stream into no less than 16MB of RAM (SRAM limit at time) that I iterated through randomly with a hash function. All inherently sequential, random, and large. Accelerate that! Fortunately, Colin Percival came up with a much better solution in scrypt. It's a nice default if you want something battle-tested for a long time. Nobody should be using SHA-1, etc with solutions like scrypt available.
  • tptacek 10y ago
    Just pick a real password hash and dial up the hardness as high as you reasonably can for your environment. Don't do anything more complicated than that.
    • nickpsecurity 10y ago
      That's what I do these days. Inspired by scrypt or bcrypt. Whichever I saw first. :)
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]