[sehrope]

Or even better dont't even store them at all.

If its an internal app use LDAP, Active Directory, or whatever other centralized ID system your company has. If it's a public app then consider using a federated approach like OpenID. It doesn't make sense for everything but if you can avoid storing passwords entirely then it's one less thing that can go wrong[1].

Course if you do store them then yes:

scrypt > bcrypt > PBKDF2 > ... If you get to here then you've got a problem!

Just make sure you choose a same number of rounds. PBDKF2 is fine for most folks if you have a large enough number of rounds. The old recommended default of 1K is not large enough. Ditto for bcrypt with a work factor less than 10 (or better yet 12). Your bet bet is to either use scrypt (who's defaults are paranoid enough) or choose a work factor for bcrypt/PBKDF2 that's has a decent CPU time (say .5 to 1s).

[1]: Though you do have to worry about the risk of compromise of the party your delegating too. For apps where this makes sense (say Google+ login to a Grouppn knockoff) that's a fair enough trade off for you an your users.

[jervisfm]

Not sure why you're downvoted, but the idea of actually not storing passwords seemed intriguing to me, if it was actually possible.

I did a little bit of research and I found the Secure Remote Password protocol [1]. Interestingly, this protocol does appear to protect against the case of a stolen password database. If true, that would mean that when site X loses control of the password database, that would be OK as this is designed to be secure against that attack.

I wonder why it's not been implemented anywhere widely. Anyone more knowledgeable about the security field care to comment.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protocol

[sehrope]

Yeah I'm not sure either about the down vote. By not storing passwords I meant delegating to an external authority for authentication services. Whether that's OpenID, Persona, Facebook login, direct OAuth integration with a limited number of parties (ex: GitHub and Google Plus) can be decided on a per app basis. The important thing is the if your app use case allows you to delegate out authentication to an external party (again it's a non-trivial "if" to decide this) then you don't have to store or deal with passwords at all (and by extension don't need to worry about handling password DB leaks or hashing algos).

[iopq]

OpenID is a horrible idea. I have like a bunch of them, and I never remember if I signed up with Yahoo for this site or Google or whatever.

With Persona at least I know which email I use to sign up for random websites. I hope it succeeds.