4 ms·

One way hash schemes are absolutely primitives. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_primitive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_primitive fo

One way hash schemes are absolutely primitives. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_primitive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_primitive for clarification. You can introduce slowing factors like seed values and iterations (bcrypt uses both) but they're a bad idea if you're doing it yourself. For example, your initial estimate of 50 iterations is at least a couple of orders of magnitude out. How many is safe? 10,000? 100,000? BTW, I'd be interested to know exactly what this mythical situation is where you're handling user accounts, but don't have access to one of the existing bycrypt implementations (C, Ruby, Python, PHP) and can't compile your own.

ErrantX 16y ago
It's not really a primitive, but I'll concede the point. Similarly the one about 50 iterations, that was somewhat silly (there is a reason I have that number in mind, but I won't bore with details). However. Mythical situation? Try a good portion of shared PHP hosting; why do you think the most popular software in the world (i.e. stuff like Wordpress) still supports MD5/Sha hashing? I realise this is not a problem you may have come across before; but don't imagine it does not exist :)
- anthonyb 16y ago
  So use PHP-ass: http://www.openwall.com/phpass/ http://www.openwall.com/phpass/. It's integrated into Wordpress and does all of that stuff, including falling back to md5 if you have a really crappy host. But really - it's just another reason not to use PHP, and not to have a crappy webhost. You could probably say much the same things about backups, app security, bad UI or design. But for most people, don't do that is apparently not a good enough answer. Update: Just looking into how Django stores passwords, and it does much the same thing (although it falls back to SHA-1, rather than MD5). There was a push to use bcrypt a while back, but it got marked wontfix, due to "backwards compatibility issues". Sigh.

ErrantX 16y ago

It's not really a primitive, but I'll concede the point. Similarly the one about 50 iterations, that was somewhat silly (there is a reason I have that number in mind, but I won't bore with details). However. Mythical situation? Try a good portion of shared PHP hosting; why do you think the most popular software in the world (i.e. stuff like Wordpress) still supports MD5/Sha hashing? I realise this is not a problem you may have come across before; but don't imagine it does not exist :)

anthonyb 16y ago
So use PHP-ass: http://www.openwall.com/phpass/ http://www.openwall.com/phpass/. It's integrated into Wordpress and does all of that stuff, including falling back to md5 if you have a really crappy host. But really - it's just another reason not to use PHP, and not to have a crappy webhost. You could probably say much the same things about backups, app security, bad UI or design. But for most people, don't do that is apparently not a good enough answer. Update: Just looking into how Django stores passwords, and it does much the same thing (although it falls back to SHA-1, rather than MD5). There was a push to use bcrypt a while back, but it got marked wontfix, due to "backwards compatibility issues". Sigh.