Hacker News Reader

This is a good practical question. My read of the algorithm is that you must force each user to enter a new password, and encrypt that at the new higher cost.

If you wanted to "upgrade" the passwords to the higher cost key schedule, you'd just continue the key schedule where it left off--but this would require knowing the original password! So that's not really an option.

View on HN

What about performing the hashing again, on the existing hash (of course it would be simplest to encrypt from the beginning when user logs in again, but just for discussion's sake). Let's say we have a legacy db with hashes created with small work factor. We could simply perform the hashing on these previous hashes (increasing work factors as appropriate). We could simply annotate the fact that one have to perform the hashing two times.

Of course we're 'overthinking' it again, but is the above solution viable?

You can upgrade passwords when the user logs in. The sanest thing to do seems to be to store all the public variables (work factor, salt) alongside the digest so each password can be handled separately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com