3 ms·
> Now, on the attacker's side the picture looks drastically different. The amount of time required to brute-force through the already salted hashes grows expone
by khafra 15y ago
> Now, on the attacker's side the picture looks drastically different. The amount of time required to brute-force through the already salted hashes grows exponentially with the length of the pepper string.
That isn't drastically different. The amount of time required scales exponentially with the pepper string for both the attacker and the legitimate authentication server. Not really different from increasing the work factor with bcrypt; and not as cool as increasing the circuit size with scrypt.
- eruquen 15y agoYou are right, I should clarify this. For the authentication server the time required jumps from close to nothing to a few ms. For the attacker, the time jumps from a few hours or days to a few years or decades. This asymmetry is what I meant when I said that it's a drastically different picture. Peppering is applicable to all hashing algorithms unlike the specific parameters you mentioned.