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Should you store password salt database?
I’ve always used a proper per-entry salt string when hashing passwords for database storage. For my needs, storing the salt in the DB next to the hashed password has always worked fine. However, some people recommend that the salt be stored separately from the database.
Why is it important that the original salt is stored along with the password and can be extracted separately?
Because the salt is different for each password, each needs to be cracked individually. The salt and number of rounds used is stored with the password hash, meaning that if the attacker has one, they also have the other.
Is the password stored in the bcrypt hash?
The bcrypt password storage is said to have built in salt. What this means is that you don’t have to create a separate column in your database for the salt. The bcrypt hash already has the salt attached to it for simplicity and you can just store it as is.
Why is the salt space important in bcrypt?
The salt space is large enough to mitigate precomputation attacks, such as rainbow tables. It has an adaptable cost. The designers of bcrypt believe that the function will hold its strength and value for many years. Its mathematical design gives assurance to cryptographers about its resilience to attacks.
Why is bcrypt more secure than other passwords?
In computer security, increasing the required computation time for cracking a key generally results in greater security, because by definition if it takes longer to crack a single password, given a fixed amount of resources, the intruder will be able to break less passwords.
How does bcrypt prevent a rainbow table attack?
In order to make it hard to use rainbow table attacks, bcrypt uses a technique in which it not only encrypts your password, but it adds a random string to your password, and it computes the hash for these values together. This hash is then stored in the user database for athentication in the future. What is a rainbow table attack?