6 ms·
Reading this discussion on bcrypt and timing attacks, I have a question. Aren't systems like these designed so that even someone who has access to the hashed pa
by nu23 15y ago
Reading this discussion on bcrypt and timing attacks, I have a question. Aren't systems like these designed so that even someone who has access to the hashed password, the randomly created salt and the hashing algorithm cannot find the password? If timing attacks help in some way, doesn't this mean some small compromise for this goal? Bruteforce attacks can of course be done faster by someone who has access but this seems to be independent from timing issues.
- biot 15y agoExactly. Someone hacks your server, downloads your entire database containing email addresses and bcrypt-hashed passwords. They can plow through these at full-speed on their own system and will be limited to calculating a handful of hashes per second due to the computational intensity of calculating the bcrypt hash. Compare this to MD5 where they can generate tens of millions (or more) hashes per second, salt or no salt.