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by amlozano 2350 days ago
When talking about passwords specifically in our reports (I work at a security company too), I tell our team to use the same language as NIST 800-63B, since its the best "standard" for passwords and authentication I can find.

The relevant bit here is this:

Verifiers SHALL store memorized secrets in a form that is resistant to offline attacks. Memorized secrets SHALL be salted and hashed using a suitable one-way key derivation function. Key derivation functions take a password, a salt, and a cost factor as inputs then generate a password hash.

They are specific about the type of KDF required: "one-way key derivation function".

The examples given later are PBKDF2 and Balloon.

1 comments

That's one of the reference documents we also use. Somehow I still feel like KDF (or "one-way KDF") describes a broader set of algorithms than we truly mean, but you make a good point that if some official body writes it this way, the terminology is probably at least correct enough.