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NaCl (Networking and Cryptography Library, pronounced "salt") is a public domain, high-speed software library for cryptography. [2]NaCl was created by the mathematician and programmer Daniel J. Bernstein, who is best known for the creation of qmail and Curve25519.
Typically, a unique salt is randomly generated for each password. The salt and the password (or its version after key stretching) are concatenated and fed to a cryptographic hash function, and the output hash value is then stored with the salt in a database. The salt does not need to be encrypted, because knowing the salt would not help the ...
PBKDF2 is for generating an encryption key from a password, and not necessarily for password authentication. PBKDF2 can be used for both if the number of output bits is less than or equal to the internal hashing algorithm used in PBKDF2, which is usually SHA-2 (up to 512 bits), or used as an encryption key to encrypt static data.
One brief comment in the text mentions, but does not mandate, the possibility of simply using the ASCII encoded value of a character string: "Finally, the key argument is a secret encryption key, which can be a user-chosen password of up to 56 bytes (including a terminating zero byte when the key is an ASCII string)."
With this logic, a string of text can be encrypted by applying the bitwise XOR operator to every character using a given key. To decrypt the output, merely reapplying the XOR function with the key will remove the cipher.
The resulting string is encoded using a variant of Base64 (+/ and with padding). The authorization method and a space character (e.g. "Basic ") is then prepended to the encoded string. For example, if the browser uses Aladdin as the username and open sesame as the password, then the field's value is the Base64 encoding of Aladdin:open sesame ...
The known-plaintext attack (KPA) is an attack model for cryptanalysis where the attacker has access to both the plaintext (called a crib) and its encrypted version . These can be used to reveal secret keys and code books. The term "crib" originated at Bletchley Park, the British World War II decryption operation, where it was defined as:
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