Hacker News Reader

the password is hashed with sha1 so that the database does not need to store the actual password

This recommended approach is not good security practice for password storage. If the database is compromised, your passwords are vulnerable to rainbow table attacks. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table

View on HN

ya I should probably being using HMAC

Or a salt.

Passwords always should be salted. (meaning a -different- nonce for each password) This prevents rainbow tables from being useful. Instead of a raw hash function, you should (for maximum security) be using something specifically designed to be expensive: read pbkdf2, bcrypt, scrypt; This will make even dictionary attacks very difficult. If someone has cracked your db they also probably also have access to your HMAC key, at which point cracking can still be parallellized and is not significantly slowed.

Is there a reference implementation that you like and that is well documented.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com