Re:Security Update
by dhritzkiv on Friday May 17, 2019 @12:42AM
(#19936358)
MD5 is one thing as a password can be retrieved from a hash table. But pulling out passwords from a hashed + salted value (e.g. via bcrypt) is many orders of magnitude more infeasible, no?
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Salting was originally important as a defense against rainbow tables - which are more or less obsolete with GPUs that can crank through trillions of hashes per second. The real reason that bcrypt is a better way to store a password isn't just because it uses a salt - it's because its designed to be slow and to use a bunch of memory which makes it much harder to brute force.
I would be impressed if SO's user password table is in bcrypt.
What makes you say that? bcrypt's been the defacto best practice for user password "storage" for probably 10 years now. MD5's been known to be inadequate for much longer.
Even if they had a legacy implementation in MD5, gradually migrating from storing MD5 hashes to storing bcrypt hashes is trivial to do.
From what I understand, many systems do not choose to implement strong hashing algos.
Even PHP's hash_function uses scrypt. Yes, some people explicitly decide to hash everything with sha1 but nothing you or I do will ever be able to stop them.