The necessity of hiding the salt for a hash

Question

At work we have two competing theories for salts. The products I work on use something like a user name or phone number to salt the hash. Essentially something that is different for each user but is readily available to us. The other product randomly generates a salt for each user and changes each time the user changes the password. The salt is then encrypted in the database.

My question is if the second approach is really necessary? I can understand from a purely theoretical perspective that it is more secure than the first approach, but what about from a practicality point of view. Right now to authenticate a user, the salt must be unencrypted and applied to the login information.

After thinking about it, I just don't see a real security gain from this approach. Changing the salt from account to account, still makes it extremely difficult for someone to attempt to brute force the hashing algorithm even if the attacker was aware of how to quickly determine what it was for each account. This is going on the assumption that the passwords are sufficiently strong. (Obviously finding the correct hash for a set of passwords where they are all two digits is significantly easier than finding the correct hash of passwords which are 8 digits). Am I incorrect in my logic, or is there something that I am missing?

EDIT: Okay so here's the reason why I think it's really moot to encrypt the salt. (lemme know if I'm on the right track).

For the following explanation, we'll assume that the passwords are always 8 characters and the salt is 5 and all passwords are comprised of lowercase letters (it just makes the math easier).

Having a different salt for each entry means that I can't use the same rainbow table (actually technically I could if I had one of sufficient size, but let's ignore that for the moment). This is the real key to the salt from what I understand, because to crack every account I have to reinvent the wheel so to speak for each one. Now if I know how to apply the correct salt to a password to generate the hash, I'd do it because a salt really just extends the length/complexity of the hashed phrase. So I would be cutting the number of possible combinations I would need to generate to "know" I have the password + salt from 13^26 to 8^26 because I know what the salt is. Now that makes it easier, but still really hard.

So onto encrypting the salt. If I know the salt is encrypted, I wouldn't try and decrypt (assuming I know it has a sufficient level of encryption) it first. I would ignore it. Instead of trying to figure out how to decrypt it, going back to the previous example I would just generate a larger rainbow table containing all keys for the 13^26. Not knowing the salt would definitely slow me down, but I don't think it would add the monumental task of trying to crack the salt encryption first. That's why I don't think it's worth it. Thoughts?

Here is a link describing how long passwords will hold up under a brute force attack: http://www.lockdown.co.uk/?pg=combi

Answer 1

A hidden salt is no longer salt. It's pepper. It has its use. It's different from salt.

Pepper is a secret key added to the password + salt which makes the hash into an HMAC (Hash Based Message Authentication Code). A hacker with access to the hash output and the salt can theoretically brute force guess an input which will generate the hash (and therefore pass validation in the password textbox). By adding pepper you increase the problem space in a cryptographically random way, rendering the problem intractable without serious hardware.

For more information on pepper, check here.

See also hmac.

Answer 2

Here is a simple example showing why it is bad to have the same salt for each hash

Consider the following table

UserId  UserName,   Password
     1  Fred       Hash1 =  Sha(Salt1+Password1)    
     2  Ted        Hash2 =  Sha(Salt2+Password2)    

Case 1 when salt 1 is the same as salt2 If Hash2 is replaced with Hash1 then user 2 could logon with user 1 password

Case 2 when salt 1 not the same salt2 If Hash2 is replaced with Hash1 then user2 can not logon with users 1 password.

Answer 3

I tend to hide the salt. I use 10 bits of salt by prepending a random number from 1 to 1024 to the beginning of the password before hashing it. When comparing the password the user entered with the hash, I loop from 1 to 1024 and try every possible value of salt until I find the match. This takes less than 1/10 of a second. I got the idea to do it this way from the PHP password_hash and password_verify. In my example, the "cost" is 10 for 10 bits of salt. Or from what another user said, hidden "salt" is called "pepper". The salt is not encrypted in the database. It's brute forced out. It would make the rainbow table necessary to reverse the hash 1000 times larger. I use sha256 because it's fast, but still considered secure.

Answer 4

The second approach is only slightly more secure. Salts protect users from dictionary attacks and rainbow table attacks. They make it harder for an ambitious attacker to compromise your entire system, but are still vulnerable to attacks that are focused on one user of your system. If you use information that's publicly available, like a telephone number, and the attacker becomes aware of this, then you've saved them a step in their attack. Of course the question is moot if the attacker gets your whole database, salts and all.

EDIT: After re-reading over this answer and some of the comments, it occurs to me that some of the confusion may be due to the fact that I'm only comparing the two very specific cases presented in the question: random salt vs. non-random salt. The question of using a telephone number as a salt is moot if the attacker gets your whole database, not the question of using a salt at all.

Answer 5

There are two techniques, with different goals:

• The "salt" is used to make two otherwise equal passwords encrypt differently. This way, an intruder can't efficiently use a dictionary attack against a whole list of encrypted passwords.

• The (shared) "secret" is added before hashing a message, so that an intruder can't create his own messages and have them accepted.

Answer 6

... something like a user name or phone number to salt the hash. ...

My question is if the second approach is really necessary? I can understand from a purely theoretical perspective that it is more secure than the first approach, but what about from a practicality point of view?

From a practical point of view, a salt is an implementation detail. If you ever change how user info is collected or maintained – and both user names and phone numbers sometimes change, to use your exact examples – then you may have compromised your security. Do you want such an outward-facing change to have much deeper security concerns?

Does stopping the requirement that each account have a phone number need to involve a complete security review to make sure you haven't opened up those accounts to a security compromise?