Technology

59627 readers

2807 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

549

NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 months ago by Amicitas@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

179 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Here is the text of the NIST sp800-63b Digital Identity Guidelines.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (7 children)

What is the best practice currently?

[–] pivot_root@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

Use a library. It's far too easy for developers or project managers to fuck up the minimum requirements for safely storing passwords.

But, if you are wanting to do it by hand...

Don't use a regular hashing algorithm, use a password hashing algorithm
Use a high iteration count to make it too resource-intensive to brute force
Salt the hash to prevent rainbow tables
Salt the hash with something unique to that specific user so identical passwords have different hashes

[–] Laser@feddit.org 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Salt the hash with something unique to that specific user so identical passwords have different hashes

Isn't that... the very definition of a Salt? A user-specific known string? Though my understanding is that the salt gets appended to the user-provided password, hashed and then checked against the record, so I wouldn't say that the hash is salted, but rather the password.

Also using a pepper is good practice in addition to a salt, though the latter is more important.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Some implementers reuse the same salt for all passwords. It's not the worst thing ever, but it does make it substantially easier to crack than if everything has its own salt.

[–] orclev@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

That's a pepper not a salt. A constant value added to the password that's the same for every user is a pepper and prevents rainbow table attacks. A per-user value added is a salt and prevents a number of things, but the big one is being able to overwrite a users password entry with another known users password (perhaps with a SQL injection).

load more comments (3 replies)