> ... then they can hack those accounts in the time it takes to compute 50M 1,000 hashes*

That's why you might want to use Bcrypt instead of SHA-1 or SHA-256.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt

Maybe I'm misunderstanding (entirely possible!) and I think your point still stands, but isn't it 50M * 1,000 hashes * # of possible salts?

EDIT: Just realized that the salts have to be stored somewhere and the attacker probably grabbed those as well. I think that answers my question.

No, because the salt is stored with the password. Salts are used to defend against reversing a password hash into a password, but they don't appreciably impede bruteforcing passwords into hashes.

It does mean that for a large dictionary attack things will go a lot slower. Rather than one computing one hash and comparing it to 50M hashes, the same word must be hashed with 50M different salts and then compared with their respective hashes.

You can rent miners on the bitcoin network to use their pooled hashrate to break passwords, same with moxie's service cloudcracker.com

That's a more specific way of phrasing reversing the hash into a password, yes. ;)

Salts are used to make rainbow tables useless.

I'm curious why I've never heard anyone suggesting to make a public/private key pair, burn the the private key, and just encrypt passwords with the public key as your hashing function.

Short of finding an exploit in GPG, you'd have to crack the public key used which would be near impossible if a long key was used. This assumes you keep that key safe.

So why not literally make a key pair and throw away the key?

At best, that's just a hash function, so no matter how long the key is you can still just guess passwords and do trial encryptions just like you would with a hashed, salted password.

If you used the same key for all your site's passwords an attacker could build a rainbow table so you don't even get to not salt.

It would be a lot slower than a normal hash so it'd be harder to brute force, but you can get the same protection in a simpler, more predictable system by just using PBKDF2 with enough repeated hashes.

The situation is a bit more complicated than that : http://security.stackexchange.com/a/6415

I don't subscribe to one "scheme" for passwords since the easiest method (to implement, not crack) will be the avenue malicious hackers also pursue.

This is why most of my custom jobs involve an application specific salt per installation, in addition to the user-unique salt + password hash and then CFB encrypt the salt using another app-specific password + username hash.

I'm not saying PBKDF2 is ideal, I'm just saying that it has all the possible advantages of the proposed GPG based password storage without any of the weirdness of using crypto primitives in a way they weren't intended for.

people actually pay you just to make shit up?

Yes, actually. And to be more civilized when I disagree with them.

Edit: My standard response

http://eksith.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/diy-hashing-if-you-mu...

I can't disagree with your sentiment... there comes a point where a hardware security module makes more sense than extraordinarily convoluted, tortured concealment of the salt and hashing mechanism.

It was perhaps unnecessarily blunt, but that is the root problem with most of these leaks: Someone who doesn't know what they're doing implementing a scheme that is only slightly more secure than storing the passwords in plaintext.

It turns out LivingSocial was actually using SHA-1 with a 40 byte salt [1].

> LivingSocial never stores passwords in plain text. LivingSocial passwords were hashed with SHA1 using a random 40 byte salt. What this means is that our system took the passwords entered by customers and used an algorithm to change them into a unique data string (essentially creating a unique data fingerprint) – that’s the “hash”. To add an additional layer of protection, the “salt” elongates the password and adds complexity. We have switched our hashing algorithm from SHA1 to bcrypt.

A 40 byte salt? "_additional_ layer of protection"? "elongates the password"? It's clear they thought they were implementing extra security (hey, let's use a 40 byte salt instead of 16, mega protection!) but failed miserably because they did not know what they were trying to combat.

[1] https://www.livingsocial.com/createpassword

A similar method is a "pepper", a form of salt common to all users and stored in the application configuration, allowing the passwords to resist attack even if the hash and user-specific salt are lost. The reason it's not often used is that the assumption is that if your database is compromised, any other commonly-used secret keys on the server will be too. It can be useful for defense in depth, though.

Serious question: How is "pepper" any different than encrypting a traditional salted hash using a symmetric cipher as if it were any other kind of data?

Maybe because encryption using public key is much more CPU intensive and slower than hashing? Since you have users logging into the system all the time, you would need to encrypt the typed password in order to compare it with the record in the database, and this could put a great load on the server CPU if you have many users logging in.

That is the goal. Slower hashing is harder to crack, is more secure.

Login load is nothing compared to the rest of the app.

Sounds as if you're suggesting increasing the work for the encryption/decryption? If so, there are well known ways of increasing the work and they're designed specifically for hashing [this kind of data]. I suspect the reason people haven't used pub/priv for such uses is that there are better algorithms for it.