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by joveian 3173 days ago
A similar technique can be used in embedded systems to enhance the speed that password derived keys become unrecoverable from memory after power off: instead of storing the key directly, store it as a value that must be xored with a hash of, say, 4k of random values that are only stored in memory. Then your key is fully unrecoverable after any 256 bits of the 4k bytes have decayed as long as the RNG used to generate the random bytes is suitable and the executed code (including the OS if there is one) is verified to not store temporary values that could be recovered.

For password authentication, IMO a much better solution is to generate strong random passwords (21 character base64) for users and tell them to write them down and/or use a password manager (I think web browser based storage of generated passwords can be done without the user needing to see the password at all). You can still memorize a small number of those over a few weeks if necessary and there is no good reason to memorize a bunch of passwords.