ircmaxell makes a good point in that comment -- not that the
concept of a pepper doesn't work, but that a two-way encryption function is a better choice than a hash function for applying the pepper.
Your pepper will be a long, random key that is known to your app server but not your database server. If you store passwords as:
bcrypt(bcrypt(password, salt), pepper)
then you spend a lot of cycles bcrypting your long, random key, which is pointless (it should already be long enough to be un-brute-forceable), and you lose the ability to rotate keys or ever stop using this scheme in the future. There's also (in theory) some risk that nested bcrypt() doesn't work predictably.
If you store passwords instead as:
encrypt(bcrypt(password, salt), pepper)
then you can routinely rotate peppers through a simple one-time decrypt-and-encrypt step on your app server, instead of endlessly nesting peppers as suggested in the filippo.io blog post.
The rest of it is more of a qualitative question -- what's the risk that someone gains access to your DB but not your app server, vs. the risk that in implementing the pepper, you somehow screw up and store something easily crackable?
Your pepper will be a long, random key that is known to your app server but not your database server. If you store passwords as:
then you spend a lot of cycles bcrypting your long, random key, which is pointless (it should already be long enough to be un-brute-forceable), and you lose the ability to rotate keys or ever stop using this scheme in the future. There's also (in theory) some risk that nested bcrypt() doesn't work predictably.If you store passwords instead as:
then you can routinely rotate peppers through a simple one-time decrypt-and-encrypt step on your app server, instead of endlessly nesting peppers as suggested in the filippo.io blog post.The rest of it is more of a qualitative question -- what's the risk that someone gains access to your DB but not your app server, vs. the risk that in implementing the pepper, you somehow screw up and store something easily crackable?