Hacker News Reader

Comment by eat_veggies | Hacker News Reader

> Kim denied this. “We don’t use MD5 for our passwords to store them,” he said. “The MD5 keys were a log and it does not represent how we are managing data. We use more advanced methods like salted hash and SHA2 on securing users’ data in our database.”

!!!!!!

View on HN

Don't worry, they also double ROT13 everything.

Isn’t SHA2 the standard hashing algorithm? If not, what do people use now?

bcrypt is one example: https://auth0.com/blog/hashing-in-action-understanding-bcryp...

For password hashing, you want the operation to be slow. That way it becomes infeasable for someone to brute force many passwords.

SHA2 is very fast.

If I get any of this wrong, I claim Cunningham's Law. :)

From the "Cryptographic Right Answers" [https://latacora.micro.blog/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-a...]:

> Latacora, 2018: In order of preference, use scrypt, argon2, bcrypt, and then if nothing else is available PBKDF2.

> Avoid: SHA-3, naked SHA-2, SHA-1, MD5.

SHA2 is a decent cryptographic hashing algorithm, that is true. But a cryptographic hashing algorithm isn't what you want when storing passwords, at least, not on its own.

Some of the problems with just using a hash algorithm: same passwords have the same hash; hash algos are typically fast, so brute forcing can make many attempts quickly, and they can be pre-computed into rainbow tables. There are ways to fix this (salts, work factors), but generally you shouldn't "do it yourself."; functions like those named in the quote from Cryptographic Right Answers put all that together in a nice package. scrypt, I believe, even uses SHA-2 in its construction, but also solves the aforementioned problems.

The "Purpose and operation" part of the Wikipedia article for PBKDF2 (also mentioned above) goes into some of this, as well (even if it is only recommended as a last resort, I think this paragraph is educational w.r.t. the problems around passwords): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2#Purpose_and_operation

Back when I was a super junior php dev I stumbled across a post by Cal Henderson about using bcrypt https://www.iamcal.com/2012-06/use-bcrypt/

His lib is can be dropped in to any project (that doesn't have something similar built in already) https://github.com/iamcal/lib_bcrypt

Anyone writing code has no excuse for not using this, it's not rocket surgery.

It's worth noting that the current standard encryption and password hashing in the php core is great, with no external dependencies added

For password storage? Bcrypt.

While SSHA2 isnt that bad if they’ve applied a work factor, but that’s probably not the case.

It doesn't matter what algorithm you use to hash passwords when users login if you also store them md5-ed somewhere else!

Tsk, but this was an upgrade from the old log that stored the first three letters of the passphrase.

;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com