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by benrutter 317 days ago
That's still not perfect though!

Most leaked passwords online come initially from leaked hashes, which bad actors use tools like hashcat to crack.

If your user has a password like "password123" and the hash gets out, then the password is effectively out too, since people can easily lookup the hash of previous cracked passwords like "password123".

2 comments

No. This is why salts[0] are used.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)

This is how it should be done. But it still doesn't protect users fully, because attacker can try to brute-force passwords their interested in. It requires much more effort though.
And compute-intensive hash functions. Computers this day are powerful enough to hashcat each individual pwd+salt if a fast hashing function is used.
Salting already fixed this decades ago, and most modern password libraries will automatically generate and verify against a hash like <method>$salt$saltedhash if you use them instead of rolling your own.