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You heard me. You know how weak your user’s passwords likely are. You know your users are almost certainly sharing their passwords with multiple sites. You know that a compromise of your database could lead to significant damage coming to them. You know this because it happens all the time, all over the web.
You have a duty to protect the security and privacy of your userbase. They’ve entrusted you with their data, and it is on you to keep it safe. So why aren’t you doing everything possible to accomplish that task? For this blog, we are going to talk exclusively about password storage.
If you ask just about any security professional in the world how best to store a password, you’re liable to hear something about using a cryptographically secure hashing function “with a salt.” Some will go so far as to mention algorithms like Bcrypt or Scrypt. Very few will make any mention to how password policy plays a significant part in ensuring the security of any stored values.
But almost none of them, will even mention the word “pepper.” Now I suspect this isn’t malicious, (obviously). I think even most security professionals simply aren’t informed enough to know or act with regard to this concept.
So today we’re gonna work on that…
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Muad'Dave on Wednesday March 06 2019, @12:59PM (1 child)
> rebuild the live password database to use the new pepper and then switch it to live use.
Given the algorithm of SHA256(password + salt + pepper), doesn't that require you to store the password in the clear? Hash functions are irreversible - you can't 'undo' the previous hash to generate a new one.
If you do SHA256(SHA256(password + salt) + pepper), storing the inner SHA256 somewhere away from the double SHA value, then you could rebuild the DB, but now you're doubling the compute power needed. Plus, if an intruder gets access to the inner SHA values, he has what's essentially the password and must only guess the pepper.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 06 2019, @03:14PM
Excellent point - surprised it took this long for somebody to catch it...
There could be a "high security" salted password database somewhere, and the salt & pepper database could be the live use one that's presumably more vulnerable to exfiltration. That would work, but, you're right, it's on the lame side, since the "high security" password database is still lying somewhere with no pepper applied.
As for doubling the compute power needed to compute the SHA256s - is that really a concern anywhere?
I'm just distrustful of stale secrets, which a fixed pepper would become. The longer it is in use, the more people will end up knowing it.
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