From one of my favorite books ever, Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier “If someone created a database of all primes, won’t he be able to use that database to break public-key algorithms? Yes, but he can’t do it. If you could store one gigabyte of information on a drive weighing one gram, then a list … Read more
Since questions about salting hashes come along on a quite regular basis and there seems to be quite some confusion about the subject, I extended this answer. What is a salt? A salt is a random set of bytes of a fixed length that is added to the input of a hash algorithm. Why is … Read more
A public salt will not make dictionary attacks harder when cracking a single password. As you’ve pointed out, the attacker has access to both the hashed password and the salt, so when running the dictionary attack, she can simply use the known salt when attempting to crack the password. A public salt does two things: … Read more