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Comment by mantrax3

The problem of lookup table attacks is solved by the public salt I already mentioned. HMAC protects against attacks like length extension (google it), which aren't applicable for discovering a password from a hash.

Encryption also does nothing here, because it's reversible.

Your encryption key is somewhere on your server, so whatever you encrypted (either the plain text password, or the hash) can be decrypted once, and then if it's a hash you just attack the bare hash as usual (brute force, dictionary etc.).

Instead of encryption you can just store part of the salt outside the DB, but with a good hash this is usually not needed and just pointless obfuscation.

parent mantrax3 12 years ago

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