Coda Hale lives in San Francisco, CA, where he writes about software development and such.
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31 Jan 2010
bcrypt
Use bcrypt. Use bcrypt. Use bcrypt. Use bcrypt. Use bcrypt. Use bcrypt. Use bcrypt. Use bcrypt. Use bcrypt.
MD5
, SHA1
, SHA256
, SHA512
, SHA-3
, etc}?These are all general purpose hash functions, designed to calculate a digest of huge amounts of data in as short a time as possible. This means that they are fantastic for ensuring the integrity of data and utterly rubbish for storing passwords.
A modern server can calculate the MD5 hash of about 330MB every second. If your users have passwords which are lowercase, alphanumeric, and 6 characters long, you can try every single possible password of that size in around 40 seconds.
And that’s without investing anything.
If you’re willing to spend about 2,000 USD and a week or two picking up CUDA, you can put together your own little supercomputer cluster which will let you try around 700,000,000 passwords a second. And that rate you’ll be cracking those passwords at the rate of more than one per second.
It’s important to note that salts are useless for preventing dictionary attacks or brute force attacks. You can use huge salts or many salts or hand-harvested, shade-grown, organic Himalayan pink salt. It doesn’t affect how fast an attacker can try a candidate password, given the hash and the salt from your database.
Salt or no, if you’re using a general-purpose hash function designed for speed you’re well and truly effed.
bcrypt
Solves These ProblemsHow? Basically, it’s slow as hell. It uses a variant of the Blowfish
encryption algorithm’s keying schedule, and introduces a work factor, which
allows you to determine how expensive the hash function will be. Because of
this, bcrypt
can keep up with Moore’s law. As computers get faster you can
increase the work factor and the hash will get slower.
How much slower is bcrypt
than, say, MD5
? Depends on the work factor. Using
a work factor of 12, bcrypt
hashes the password yaaa
in about 0.3 seconds on
my laptop. MD5
, on the other hand, takes less than a microsecond.
So we’re talking about 5 or so orders of magnitude. Instead of cracking a
password every 40 seconds, I’d be cracking them every 12 years or so. Your
passwords might not need that kind of security and you might need a faster
comparison algorithm, but bcrypt
allows you to choose your balance of speed
and security. Use it.
Use bcrypt
.
I’ve been getting pretty regular emails about this article for the past year, and I figured I’d address some of the concerns here rather than have the same conversations over and over again.
Isn’t
bcrypt
just Blowfish? Where do you store the password?
Please read the Provos & Mazières paper. bcrypt
is an adaptive password hashing algorithm which uses the Blowfish keying schedule, not a symmetric encryption algorithm.
You said salts aren’t helpful, but what about rainbow tables? Why would you suggest people not use salts?
As the Provos & Mazières paper describes, bcrypt
has salts built-in to prevent rainbow table attacks. So I’m not saying salts are without purpose, I’m saying that they don’t prevent dictionary or brute force attacks (which they don’t).
Rainbow tables, despite their recent popularity as a subject of blog posts, have not aged gracefully. CUDA/OpenCL implementations of password crackers can leverage the massive amount of parallelism available in GPUs, peaking at billions of candidate passwords a second. You can literally test all lowercase, alphabetic passwords which are ≤7 characters in less than 2 seconds. And you can now rent the hardware which makes this possible to the tune of less than $3/hour. For about $300/hour, you could crack around 500,000,000,000 candidate passwords a second.
Given this massive shift in the economics of cryptographic attacks, it simply doesn’t make sense for anyone to waste terabytes of disk space in the hope that their victim didn’t use a salt. It’s a lot easier to just crack the passwords. Even a “good” hashing scheme of SHA256(salt + password)
is still completely vulnerable to these cheap and effective attacks, thus the importance of an adaptive hashing algorithm like bcrypt
.