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As part of security work i've had this article cited back to me a number of times from developers who 5 minutes earlier didn't even know what bcrypt was but Goo
by nikcub 13y ago
As part of security work i've had this article cited back to me a number of times from developers who 5 minutes earlier didn't even know what bcrypt was but Googled for a rebuttal to my recommendation to improve their existing [plain text|md5|sha] scheme.
Some might consider 'just use bcrypt' as a cargo cult, but it greatly simplifies selling a safe password scheme to the 90% of developers who aren't crypto or security aware. It is something as simple as 'check the padlock in your browser'
Having a high ranking post titled 'Don't use bcrypt' complicates and muddies the issue all over again.
- ballard 13y agoProbably the same people that think hashing a message and a secret key together is a secure MAC (sans Keccak).
- mjolk 13y ago30 votes on a hacker news post is hardly "high ranking" and if someone argued based on the quality and content of this blog post, I'd laugh all the way into making all his/her commits come from pull requests.
- lambda 13y agoYeah, the message shouldn't be "don't use bcrypt". It should be "use bcrypt in preference to any small fixed number of iterations of SHA-n or MD5, and in preference to PBKDF unless you need to comply with some particular standard, and use scrypt in preference to bcrypt if it's available in your environment." I don't know of any distros (BSD or Linux) which have PBKDF or scrypt available as crypt(3) hashes, but there are distros which have bcrypt available. So, for many use cases, bcrypt is the most secure hash that's easily available without adding extra dependencies.