What the user chose as their password should be irrelevant if using a good hash.
[Edit: I stand corrected on the effect of password length.]
Let's also assume that this perfect SHA-4 function is freakishly fast, say, a million times faster than SHA-1.
Now, even though my imaginary SHA-4 function is perfect in every way, it would be strictly worse to use this for password hashing than SHA-1. Why? Because cryptographic attacks aren't the problem here. The problem is that the entropy of a user's password is very VERY small. So small, in fact, that attacks on passwords aren't done through cryptographic weaknesses, they are done by simply hashing everything someone might pick as a password and asking "did I get it right?". An attacker will repeat this process for a little while, and eventually they'll get the answer "YES, this user chose to make abc123 as their password!".
A "perfect in every respect" hash then would be one that takes a consistent, acceptably-long time. Some large fraction of a second perhaps.
Of course, this fictional hash wouldn't be the right choice for everything. But for password hashing, it's a good start.
No, not really. Hashing functions aren't designed for passwords, they're mainly used for integrity checks and other uses which need to be fast: why do you think one of the axes the SHA-3 hashes are competing on is speed?
You have your 10gb file and want to send it to your coworker and let him know it's really yours and no one has messed with it. So you run an HMAC over it and then sign it with your private key.
You want it to be as fast as possible. It would be optimal if there was a single x86 instruction called sha4 which did this in the time it takes to do an add.
Hashing is really, really not meant for passwords.
Or, go on and tell me more about all the things hashes are used for as if I just fell off the turnip truck.
This discussion is not about checksums on files. It's abotu passwords. And your "perfect hash" in your example about passwords is "freakishly fast." In fact, like the other guy that replied to me mentioned, this is the entire point of the workfactor in bcrypt, right?
Of course, bycrypt is really, really not meant for checksums. Good thing nobody was talking about checksums then.
I then didn't respond to the rest of the post because when you said "for password hashing, it's a good start" I again assumed you were talking about my hash function, which is not good for hashing. Yours would be perfectly fine.
I apologize.
This is why they invented key stretching: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2
Just set number of rounds to 10000000000 instead of, like, 10000 for SHA1.
1 billion passwords per second is 86 trillion passwords per day. If a hacker wanted to gain access to a particular password then it can become trivial to crack with fairly modest resources. The only thing that protects you is a sufficiently complex and long password.
8 days for one password is a very short amount of time comparatively (tiny for a botnet). If you use bcrypt, which you can force a certain complexity on, you can get that amount of time up much higher.