this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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So what does the password length matter if they also get the salt?
A password only 8 chars long can still be brute forced, salt or not.
Without salt, the attacker would make a guess, run the hash on the password, and compare it to the stored version.
With salt, the attacker would make a guess, combine it with the salt, and then run the hash and compare like before.
What salt does is prevent a shortcut. The attacker has a big list of passwords and their associated hash values. They grab the hash out of the leaked database, compare it to the list, and match it to the original plaintext. When the hashes have a salt, they would need to generate the list for every possible salt value. For a sufficiently long salt that's unique to each password entry, that list would be infeasible to generate, and infeasible to store even if you could.
If your passwords were long and random enough, then it's also infeasible to generate that list to cover everything. It really only works against dictionary words and variations (like "P4ssw0rD").