Tagged Questions
3
votes
4answers
237 views
Knowing a valid salted hash for an unknown secret, is it possible to compute another valid hash?
$H(s,r)=d$ is a function that hashes the secret string $s$ with a salt $r$, and returns a digest $d$.
$r$ may be arbitrarily chosen and each $r$ returns a different $d$.
For any $d$, $r$ is known from ...
2
votes
1answer
99 views
How to use salt if I am sending hashed password?
If have application that is sending username and hashed password to server for authentication, how would I use salt for this scenario ?
2
votes
2answers
180 views
Hashing passwords with a salt - why use different salt for everyone?
Given a database where we have usernames and passwords, we want to secure users' passwords by hashing them. We should not use only username and passwords in this hash, as someone having data from ...
6
votes
1answer
194 views
Using SHA-256 with different initial hash value
FIPS 180-3 defines the initial hash value for SHA-256 as the first 32 bits of the fractional parts of the square roots of the first 8 primes 2..19. What would be the risks of using a different value ...
4
votes
1answer
214 views
Why x00 is usually avoided in salt?
In .NET Framework, there is a cryptographic Random Number Generator (RNG) provider which enables to generate a cryptographically strong sequence of random bytes. This provider contain, among others, ...
3
votes
2answers
402 views
How did LinkedIn “salt” all their passwords?
First, just to make sure I understand "salting" correctly:
You randomly generate a string to append to the password before hashing it, so as to increase its length and make precomputed tables much ...
3
votes
1answer
224 views
What's the reason for applying the hash twice when hashing with salt?
One of the typical approaches to computing a salted hash is this:
hash(salt+hash(secret))
where hash is something like SHA-256 hash function - taking any size ...
3
votes
3answers
469 views
Why hash or salt when signing?
I've seen an example of how to sign using RSA. Besides the signing itself (s = m^d mod n) it also hashes and adds an IV.
Why is that needed?
3
votes
3answers
856 views
Simple/beginner level explanation of salt
I'm a beginner to cryptography and looking to understand in very simple terms what salt is, when I might need to use it and why I should/should not use it. Can anyone offer me a very simple and clear ...
0
votes
2answers
388 views
Salts, how does the script know what the salt is?
I am new to PHP programming and trying to grasp the idea of hashing and encryption for protecting passwords, credit card details and such. I've done a lot of reading about MD5 which I think I ...
5
votes
2answers
1k views
Use of salt to hash a password
In a few implementations of hashed passwords, I have seen that the length of the random salt is chosen to be, say, 10 or "some constant". Is there any specific reason why the salt is chosen to have a ...
3
votes
2answers
142 views
Does the position of the salt improve its effectiveness when hashing?
Seems most documentation I have read suggests the salt should prefix the value to be hashed. Is this just for consistency, or is the salt more effective when prefixed?
3
votes
1answer
136 views
Is a using salt important when creating a hash data validator?
I am creating a service that will return an set of objects, which will be used by multiple systems. At the end of the process, one (or more) of the objects will be sent back to our system for ...
18
votes
4answers
433 views
Necessity of Randomness of Salts?
Given the desire to have unique salts for each user of your system, is it actually necessary to create a cryptographically-random salt for each user? If your system already has some other unique user ...
8
votes
3answers
1k views
How can a random salt for a hash function work in practice?
I understand the theory behind the use salts in hash functions, but when I see it implemented, the implementations always generate the salt on the fly and the salt appears to be different for every ...
