Are You Sure SHA-1+Salt Is Enough For Passwords?

Melchett writes "It's all too common that Web (and other) applications use MD5, SHA1, or SHA-256 to hash user passwords, and more enlightened developers even salt the password. And over the years I've seen heated discussions on just how salt values should be generated and on how long they should be. Unfortunately in most cases people overlook the fact that MD and SHA hash families are designed for computational speed, and the quality of your salt values doesn't really matter when an attacker has gained full control, as happened with rootkit.com. When an attacker has root access, they will get your passwords, salt, and the code that you use to verify the passwords."

Comments

Re:The problem is people

[vlm]

Like TFA says, worry more about the passwords people choose. It doesn't matter if you use SHA-1, MD5, or an HMAC, if the idiot types "password" for his password, it's going to be discovered on the first loop of anyone's "common passwords" list.

Its best to go overboard and require a minimum of 15 characters, a mix of upper and lowercase, at least two non-consecutive numbers and at least two punctuation marks. And store then so they can't reuse their previous 20 passwords. That way the users will exclusively save the password in their unsecure browser, unsecure post it notes, or cut and paste from a text file, or the corporate standard database that being an excel spreadsheet. Thats how REAL security pros roll, or so I'm told.