Hacker News Reader

It does not really matters, the purpose of salting is to avoid rainbow table attacks (i.e. comparing against precomputed dictionaries of known hashes). (Edit: typo)

View on HN

If you know the salt you also have a way of generating an updated table that matches the salted hashes.

That's why the salt is randomly generated per-password, and stored in plaintext beside the (hashed) password.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com