Enough with the Salts: Updates on Secure Password Schemes

Re:Enough with the Salts: Updates on Secure Password Schemes by bradleyjg on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @01:03PM (#9305071)

I think if the most efficient way to attack the hashes is to buy the same hardware you use to process logins than in some sense you've already won. It's where the attacker can buy GPUs or program an FPGA and dollar for dollar make orders of magnitude more guesses per second than you do verifications per second that you want to avoid.

To the larger point, I do agree that some of this starts to look to be a bit of security theater. If a user picks a laughably weak password, and the server is completely compromised, it doesn't much matter what password storage scheme you used, and on the other hand if the user picks a great password, especially if he never reuses it, the consequences of losing that hash is limited.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Enough with the Salts: Updates on Secure Password Schemes by vectorjohn on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @03:30PM (#9306189)

I think maybe you missed it a bit. If attackers can spend a bunch of money to guess enough passwords to be useful in, say, weeks, then if you make it take 100 times as long, now it's years.

And using scrypt with a decent work factor isn't 100 times harder, its tens or hundreds of thousands of times harder.

Additionally, I think one of the benefits of scrypt is that it is specfically designed to deter GPU or FPGA attacks because it is memory intensive instead of just CPU.

[ Parent | on HN ]